Special journal books, visiting at the store, 100 year old elder role model,

Special journal books, visiting at the store, 100 year old elder role model,
itinerant art & performance, the MusicBoat Man, unfinished paintings from class...

11/20/11
11:35a

It was another day of having no idea what to write about. Nothing much of interest had passed through her mind that morning. She'd woken from an unpleasant part of a dream that seemed prompted by the movie she had been watching before going to sleep for the evening. The music from the movie had been running through her head all day. The movie she had watched was about the young Queen Victoria. More and more she had been finding it such a nightmare to see people living in such sumptuous settings yet being effectively in prisons, emotional hostages. People created such unhappiness and meanness seemingly perpetually.

Why could writing not be like improvisational music or acting? Perhaps because it did not take place with an immediate live audience? That was not what writing was though. With a live audience one would speak rather than write. Writing was something that captured words and ideas to hold them for another time. There was writing that was a transcript of a speech already given or a dictation.

She had been browsing for more information about the Nanowrimo project. She had found discussions among writers about their dealings with plot and character problems. As she read some of these discussions, she felt surer that she had no interest in having to make up stories and characters like that, to such a big extent. Yes, she loved the concept of being able to make a story for others to get lost in, a world to take others away, but she had no interest in having to cook all that up. It sounded far too complex and huge for her. She believed however, that she still wanted to test out whether it was possible to learn how to make up little stories. Was that a skill one could learn?

It was the same in certain books and shows for her. When a story seemed to be about an endless stream of difficulties each caused by previously made errors, the story drove her nuts. She could not bear to watch it. She liked to see how people grew and developed through their problems. Someone's constant misadventures was neither comical nor interesting to her. It seemed pointless.

The other day at the big department store she had been again ogling the writing journals that were now so available on a mass scale. She believed this trend was just a passing fad. The one she was drawn to was a lovely raspberry color. It was a plastic leather simulated cover with narrow ruled paper. Such narrow ruling allowed for quite small writing. Much as she liked the idea of the book she knew she could no longer use that kind of book for journal writing. Now she used large fat spiral notebooks of as many pages as possible with 'college' ruling. She had no idea how many of these she used in a year, but she had about 5 file boxes full of this kind of journal from the past 18 years.

Long ago she had a favorite diary format she wrote in. It was a small, fat, very narrow ruled, leatherette embossed, gilt edged, facsimile of an old daily diary produced by one of the traditional diary makers. In those days these books were enough to contain her writing. She did not do it on a daily basis, just when she could. It was mostly and account of what was going on in her life. There would be huge blanks in the entries. At one point she had decided to ignore the dates of the page and just write on consecutive pages simply dating the entries. That way she could use many pages for whatever date she was on. Life with whatever job she was working at the time became too busy for keeping up with the diaries.
12:20p

When she finally had journal writing firmly entrenched in her routine she wanted to try those little dated volumes again. It turned out they had just been discontinued. They would not have been big enough for the writing she was doing. They had been so special to hold and to write in. No other book had compared to those volumes since then. Everything else was just too fancy and had too thick a paper and too wide a rule for a small size book. She wanted something of an appropriate price that would hold a lot of writing.

She admired the artist in the area who made her own journal sketch books. She was also a printmaker and made very small book editions with her woodcuts. And yet, such journals still seemed too special to be able to work freely in, no matter that the artist had said it was no problem to unbind a volume just to replace an unwanted page.

12:33p
She was at a loss again what to write about.

She had heard from a fellow crafter about the craft fair she had missed the previous day. The attendance had been down but the people had been buying. That sounded like good news. She was still glad she had stayed home and done her writing.

In the late afternoon she had gone to another town to a little discount department store. She had found traction strips to stick onto the bathtub bottom. She had gotten a big can of honey roasted peanuts. These she kept in the car, supposedly to throw out to the crows and squirrels on occasion but also as a treat for herself. They had to be kept in the back seat so that had to make special effort to eat them. The price of them had not yet gone up in response to the peanut shortage she had heard about. There had been a drought in peanut growing land that year which had destroyed a hefty portion of the crop. Peanut prices were due to rise to a point where the schools would not be offering peanut butter sandwiches in their school lunch programs. She had heard this on the radio.

She had run into several acquaintances at the store and had a few chats. She was finding it difficult to see how much some people were aging, though not all. She presumed she must be visibly aging herself as well. She was always wondering just what it was about someone that made them age so visibly or not. She believed it had to be their own attitudes and beliefs about aging that caused the effect. Others preferred to believe it was 'in the genes' or in the food one ate.

12:50p
She had chatted with the young woman with whose family she had often spent Thanksgiving. The elder of this family would be turning 100 a few days after Thanksgiving. This man was a role model of age, youth, vigor, and purposeful living. He had continued to go hunting every hunting season and always bagged a deer. He kept up with mowing his son's extensive lawns. He made visits to sick people. He was always joking and telling stories.

1:00p 1189 words

With the one friend she had run into, she had discussed how her free art classes were going. She had said how low the attendance was now that the visitors were gone and others had headed away for the winter. Also that it seemed that people had wanted watercolor classes rather than drawing with pencils and crayons. She explained that she preferred a big class and still did not understand whether it was actual teaching she liked or the interacting of that context and the working to get a group of people interacting as a whole. Her friend had suggested she needed someone else to get the groups together. Perhaps. She preferred the idea of being where people already were gathered and/or being somewhere that one could spontaneously gather people around one by what one was doing.

Another itinerant performer story that she was so captivated by was that of the 'Music Boat Man' of Holland. She had heard that story on the radio years ago. He had built himself this funny little curiosity boat that was a one man band. He, dressed as a clown, would cart his boat out to one of Holland's canals, and serenade onlookers on the bridges above with the music they responded to the most. He also involved them in the music so that they participated in it actively. He had become a well known, well loved figure. He refused to do planned events though he received many such requests. He preferred to keep things spontaneous, free, and flexible. Periodically, he, his artist wife, and their family would travel to third world countries where they would visit villages and make art with the village children. These collaborative art pieces would be somehow divided in two, so that the villagers and the MusicBoat Man each kept a half. The MusicBoat Man was able to sell his half to art collectors for profit.

1:31p 1509 words

She found it so frustrating that she rarely got to carry further the work she started in any given watercolor class. The past week they had worked on raccoons. There had been a grumble from one student about hating raccoons because of the trouble and mess they caused.

She had started her own final painting in what she called the 'direct painting' style. She did it by painting directly without any preliminary drawing. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. She had only gotten as far as getting one raccoon down on her paper. She had expected to go in and add another one or two figures to what was still a vignette painting rather than a scene. She had not packed away the table. All her painting materials were still set out where she had left them, expecting to add to the painting. By now it was just two days before class again. It hardly seemed worth packing away the table and putting all the furniture back. Every week she had to rearrange the kitchen to accommodate the large table needed for the students. Several weeks ago she had decided she would pack up right after class, or everything would end up sitting out until the next class. This time she had been positive she would get to work on the coon painting again. It had not worked out that way though.
1:50p 1746 words - finally!