We live in a hateful world. A world that I want to hit with my fists, kick with my boots, and hurt, the way it has hit, and kicked, and hurt, me and those I love. But the world isn’t a person, to be hit, or kicked, or hurt. It’s a thing. It’s a whole fucking system, and nobody’s ever bitch-slapped a system.
You can’t counter-punch politics, or swing a barstool at the lying church that taught you God is Love, then showed you who and how to hate, and in doing that, usher in God’s Kingdom just by trusting in their pasty white Jesus, and in his pumpkin-colored high priest. Their crucified and bleeding, para-military Lamb of God.
You can’t throat-punch a paradigm that makes billionaires like it used to make millionaires, or break the kneecaps of a structure that rewards politicians with millions. And turned the middle-class into foot soldiers for fascists.
You can’t choke the system that gives you life, whatever that life looks like now, because killing the system that keeps you alive ends what’s left of yours. Choke it until its eyes cloud over, and hear its windpipe crack, stealing the last of its breath, unless you’re ready for your own eyes to cloud over, and for you to breathe your last.
I’ve been impatient, I know this, because I’ve lived long enough to see what old looks like in a mirror, and how the end of my life is getting closer, but the end of the system isn’t. And I feel about as lifeless as the system that gave me life, then took it all away, until all I want is for this system to die.
So today, the only question I have left is, am I prepared to die with it? Because I already feel so dead.
A funny thing happens in November. A GOOD funny thing, to be sure.
This year, more than any other Blog November, I’ve gotten almost as many comments from ANONYMOUS, as I have from any other blog-reading friends over the past 9 years. While I’ve had several reasons explained to me why this might be, and why it might be a WordPress-Only thing, it’s still funny to me.
(keep reading BELOW the photo)
Screenshot
It’s almost feels like getting a note from a secret admirer, but without the Trader Joe’s bouquet of flowers that go with it. More quirky, less creepy. And on this day *BEFORE ELECTION DAY* when, for all our sakes, I’m trying to keep things light, and nerves on simmer, not boil, this was about the easiest thing for me to scribble in this space as I ask, if you’re leaving a comment, and it says you’re commenting anonymously, just drop your name in the comment so I can properly say thank you back. I mean, I already appreciate you being here and all, I just want to know who it is that’s making me smile with their comments.
Anyway, I’m so glad you’ve been here so far. Let’s keep going.
Talk to you tomorrow.
*a wi-fi glitch caused this post, written on November 4, to be posted on November 5. I owe you one more post, later today*
It’s been a minute, so let me re-introduce myself.
My name is Friday. Bill Friday. A lot has changed for me since 2015, The first year I signed up to do National Blog Posting Month, or NanoPoblano as it was called, before Cheer Peppers became our official name. Back then, our Forever Admin and Moderator Emeritus, Ra Avis, asked me ever so politely if I wanted to do this thing, though I’d already been a WordPress blogger for a few years, so that I could discover the joy… and occasional panic… of writing a blog post a day for 30 straight days.
And after Rara gave me the hard dinosaur side-eye, I willingly caved.
Now it’s 9 years later, though not 9 years in a row, and I feel like I have some unfinished blog business. That’s why, just a couple of days ago, I let our little corner of the bloggy world know that I was back.
But don’t call it a comeback. I been here for years.
Now, the basics, for those I haven’t met. Blogger since 2007, author of two books of poetry with one more on the way. Born, raised, and almost died a few times, in Southern California, but now living in the cautionary tale known as Long Island, New York. I have two grown children, three grandchildren, and three grand-dogs, all spread out across the country, and friends… my chosen family… even more spread out than that.
And for right now, I think I’m going to take this month to not only re-introduce myself to you, but re-introduce myself to myself. I’ll be sharing thoughts I scribble much too quickly into the ongoing journal I’ve been keeping since 2017, both the joyous, and the painful. Things in the news, which will likely piss some of you off. And poems I’ve written that will, soon enough, find their way into print. Maybe even poems about love, or baseball. Probably both.
And you never know, I just might tell you about my long overdue creative plans, that really ought to see the light of day, before it’s too late. So for now, let’s all get settled in. I’m looking forward to reading as many of your posts as I can this month, and for us to get to know each other along the way.
I cobbled together pictures to include in this last November blog post, before December comes, and my life changes back again. Before my life changes forward.
I’m tired. We’re all tired. More than just body tired, although that’s a lot of it. The brain affects the body, and the body affects the brain. This world affects the brain AND the body. I’d like to think we all see that now. Remember that. Scrapbook that. And keep that scrapbook on the coffee table of our lives. Always handy. Always at hand [08:45].
[08:46] I don’t want to write any more than that on this subject. Not here, in this journal. Not now, before I get other things off my mind and out of my system. I have a lot to do. Not today, but very soon. Maybe even tomorrow, when there isn’t THIS to do. No, really, move off now. Move onto something, anything, else [08:50].”
That was the first page of the day, handwritten, before following my own orders for the day. Now, I’m making this up as I go. Gathering the images that meant the most to me over the last 30 days of NanoPoblano. Playing connect the dots with content, hoping that things end up where I want them on the page, and NOT like David Hedison’s head on the body of a fly, crying “Helllllp meeeee” before Vincent Price ended what would become Jeff Goldblum’s least appreciated SciFi reboot.
Oh yeah, help me. There’s a takeaway that I’ve tucked in my pocket on the way out the door of this November blog month, that reads loud and clear in the image above. That “sadness isn’t the only muse”. I vaguely wrote something in the neighborhood of that, in passing, somewhere inside the post with the Motorola Razr in the picture, about how, if I had released my next book back when all my motivation for writing was dark, sad, angry, drunken pain, it would’ve been utter and total shit. In the half-dozen years from the release of my last book until now, I’ve LIVED all the shit that needs to be lived, and lived through, before you can listen to another, better, muse.
Now, all there is to do is look forward. Thanks to all who read, wrote, or participated in any form they chose. These last 30 days have been my love poem to all of you. As someone who once wrote a poem about never again writing love poems, I hope you can appreciate the irony.
For now, I’m going to leave you with that thing I write at the end of most of my November posts. It might not be literal this time, but the wish is always on my heart.
It’s day twenty-nine and I didn’t get an early enough start.
I thought, as the day kept getting on with itself, and I wasn’t, that maybe there was something in the archives I could slap up on the blog, then take the rest of the day to come up with something fresh to end the month on, tomorrow.
A thought flashed across my mind; the remembrance of something I’d already written, a year or more ago. So I set myself to digging, and I found it. I did a few edits on it, because this poem I haven’t been able to let go of, and even submitted to a couple of places at the end of 2022, always felt bloated and croaky, like words coming out of someone who had spent a long winter with laryngitis, forgetting what their real voice sounded like.
I was about ready to copy and paste from Word Doc to WordPress, when the whisper of a thought floated in the space between bits and bytes.
“Is it, has it, was it, did I already… maybeeeee?”
Scroll-scroll-scroll on the blog, back, back, to day eleven. One loud exhale through pursed lips. One more click, and, and.
Damn.
See, my problem with writing is, well… that. Give it any name you want, it’s that my archives have kinda taken the form of a cave full of junk drawers, all piled up on each other, every drawer neatly labeled, but with descriptions that tell you absolutely nothing about what’s in them. It’s a filing system that could get you fired, if you were doing the filing for someone else. For me, I wouldn’t be surprised if I have upwards of a dozen different versions of poems, in various stages of editing. And even though this is a sort of funny story that will have a fun ending in another 50 words or so, over the days to come, I may have to address this problem before I move forward with the plan I blogged about only yesterday.
Or maybe I’ll just delete all of it, and start over again.
We’ll see.
But before I cross, or burn, that bridge when I come to it, here’s the thought I came up with to leave for you at the end of day twenty-nine. How about BOTH POEMS? Day eleven AND day twenty-nine, side by side, to show you what goes through my mind, every time I write a poem for submission. Call it the “what to leave in… what to leave out” according to Bob Seeger.
So, for my next-to-the-last day of NanoPoblano 2023, TWO versions of the same poem. Also, please tell me which one you like better in the comments. Because remember, there are no wrong answers, only wrong publishers to reject them.
Insert laughter here.
.
Half-Staff (day eleven)
I guess the next thing would be to outlaw flags at half-staff. That is,
if we’re not going to outlaw
their cause.
It would be easier to do that, because remembering the names of the dead is hard.
And just like every year I do this 30 day challenge, I fall short. Short of everything I wanted to write, and short of all the things that have been crowding my heart and mind for the previous year, stored up in such a way that, when the time came to let it all out, it got jammed up inside me like the dryer lint that gets stuck underneath your filter. A lint clog that, if left uncollected, could… at least according to the manufacturer, TikTok, and all the urban legends… burn your whole house down.
Then again, the stuff I wanted to write this November probably could’ve burned my whole house down, all by itself, if it hadn’t gotten stuck somewhere along the way to all your glowy screens.
So instead, I burn, on the inside.
I guess that means there’s more writing for me to do.
So instead of me curling up into a tightly-packed December ball, and covering my head until that next burst of creative energy shows itself sometime after the first of the year, when THIS December hits, my words will be ready to hit back. Plans are being made, and not just plans like laundry, or regular grooming and hygiene. I mean plans like “finish the damn book” and “start the next damn book”, along with “find me a publisher for BOTH damn books”. Plus, with the 2023 advent of my age-62-and-over, government cheese budget, let’s add “schedule the damn world tour with a suitcase full of the damn books” to go along with all the rest of it.
And this is your heads-up for what, besides laundry and hygiene, looks to be a busy year for me, including the usually underperforming month of December, just three days away. This gives me two more days with you before I lock the doors and draw the blinds, and knock out more words than the first of any year has held for me before.
Until right now.
Updates will be here on the blog, and all over the connected socials, when I know more.
William S. Friday 