I really haven’t much to say, except my “rain gear” isn’t strong enough for the Remnants of Ike. Got up before sunrise this morning — just woke up, no alarms or anything — and took a walk outside. Realized that when I cleaned the gutters in the early summer I didn’t clean out the garage gutters, and the rain was pouring over the sides. So I dragged out the ladder, climbed up, and by pulling out handfuls of maple seeds, released a deluge in both downspouts.
I printed the screen of my web browser because I think it’s really cool the way that Ike is still defined over Illinois: Read the rest of this entry »
Up on the roof today, while cleaning the hundreds of maple seeds out the gutters after having noticed waterfalls coming over the eaves yesterday during our 1.5 inches of rain, I realized, one, just how high I had climbed on various hills when in the NCC, and two, how natural it felt to be at a higher elevation, looking down. My head felt much more at ease up there than it has down on the ground. For a flatlander, I used to think that the roof, one and a half stories high, was tall. Up there today, though I had my usual vertigo near the edge, I didn’t feel as if I were high at all. I felt I wanted to go up another one or one and a half times the height I was already at, and then i’d start to be at the difference in elevations when I used to climb in the desert.
While clearing out the house a few days ago, the continual process that it is, I found one of my journals from when I was in college. In perusing it, I could tell that during those years I continually wrote (as a writer for my college newspaper, The Argus). My writing voice was punchy, and I didn’t continually depend on a handful of words and constructions. This post and my previous posts on this blog lack the voice I had as a writer. They lack ME as a writer. And I lack the discipline with which I used to expand and expound on a subject in an entertaining way. The paragraph above can be a creative non-fiction piece, or any other form, and could flow better, and tell itself better. Such is the challenge to me. Where I used to take liberties with my writing, and succeeded as an established writer in my niche, now I stand-by for the short, monotonous exposition.