I don’t like chit chat. Or to put nicer, chit chat is hard for me. I’ve heard this is a characteristic of introverts.
So yesterday, when I’m sitting at the baseball game, and the two single, middle-aged women, who are season ticket holders, attempt to “chit-chat” with the opposing team’s on-deck batters (and every other breathing soul that comes within one-thousand miles of them), I become frustrated.
I prefer quality rather than quantity. Deep rather than shallow. These are just preferences. I tolerate the extroverts’ gabfest. At times I dabble in it myself.
But sometimes just shut up.
I really mean this when it comes to other things other than talking. Like books and movies and songs and art. Just because you made it (or can make it) doesn’t mean you should publish it or sell it or even share it.
Some things, most things, like words and stories and thoughts, need time to grow, to mature, to deepen and strengthen. They need to be edited and worked on.
I want the best story possible from a set of words. Not just a story. I want the best movie and conversation and photograph and book. Not a bunch of them that I’ll throw away and forget.
Whether it’s one word, one color, one shot, one note, take the time to make it the best, most amazing thing ever.
I’m reading The Necessary Grace to Fall by Gina Ochsner. It won the Flannery O’Conner Award. Gina actually called me yesterday to congratulate me for getting into Seattle Pacific’s MFA writing program. She, along with Bret Lott, will be my fiction teachers. Or maybe they’re called professors. I’m not sure which. Gina actually lives in Keizer, which is where I’m from. She was very nice and described some of the things we’ll be doing at the first workshop this summer in Sante Fe. There are 7 other fiction writers in the program.
Right now the weather in Portland is wet. It’s a constant mist, not a hard rain, and it’s annoying. I don’t often long for the sun, but I am now.
You are beautiful, like prophecies, and sad, like those that come true, calm, like the calmness afterward. Black, like the white lonliness of jasmine. With sharpened fangs: she-wolf and queen.
Your very short dress is in fashion, your weeping and laughter come from ancient times, perhaps from some book of other kings. I’ve never seen foam at the mouth of a war horse, but when you lathered your body with soap I saw.
You are beautiful like prophecies that never come true. And this is the royal scar; I pass over it with my tongue and with pointed fingers over that sweet roughness.
With hard shoes you knock prison bars to and fro around me.
Your wild rings are the sacred leprosy of your fingers.
Out of the earth emerge all I wished never to see again: Pillar and window sill, cornice and jug, broken pieces of wine.
