the game

                                                  me reading over my first blog.



    Chekhov said  " write from a cold place, not hot."
Indeed, I could open with a little more originality. Yet as standards go, this one proves solid. Less concisely, I discover the actual quote is " You should sit down and write only when you feel cold as ice". A variety of sticky espresso cups bracket the edge of my vision along with a flickering cumulus of self knowledge . Not quite ice, but this front has cooled.

   I'm sitting on a beach, thinking of another. This one; North, humid and heady, the requisite Tweens, teens and twenties. The tepid water is not the draw, it smells of river clams and webbed algae. Still, the glob of sun plays upon sailboats and glares off the water even at this late hour. Northern latitudes. They play with your emotions. It is hot , but one skinny white teenage boy is reclining across the sand in full regalia of preppy dress, down to shoes and socks,  watches as his skinny white friend removes his shirt and raps to Bryson Tillers'  ' Don't' . The friend completes the song to his audience of two black girls. They are way prettier than he is. Halter topped, both, flat tummied, and still on the sweet side of young teen, one  stands and sways to his rap, as the other sits on a cooler and plays with her perfect pouf of hair in its topknot. The two girls praised his abilities " Oh he's good. Goooood, For Real Though. "  As other kids add to and grow this foursome, a video game-playing-bodied boy with that false confidence so needed at 16 and a High top hair-do posits to a delicately legged, flat haired siren that she is racist. He dismantles her sentences, interrupting her protestations until she gives up in a huff. The last thing I hear before I drift into my own reverie is the Alpha putting forward this line : " Before I start this joke, is anyone here Jewish?"

   On another beach, more Southern, more salt , more  time between this beach and that beach. I had just written a self expository article and was enjoying a private rush from being so ' courageously open'.  It did do something, at the time,  for my own well being, to control my own narrative. People congratulated me on my honesty. To hear that it was read, and meant something, to ( all of several ) people , felt like such a feat in true communication, something I  value over likability . That day on the beach I was to form a new friendship. She praised my vulnerabilities as strengths. I heard the message as such: " You are very strong about being weak". I have since taken that to heart, and I agree.
           One day I accompanied her in the retrieval of a television from the house of an ex boyfriend. This fellow had a Confederate Flag jutting over the driveway and some dogs that had to be put away before we could hoist out her large flatscreen. On the drive back, she revealed her discovery that life was a game, that people are great pretenders,  and she had finally figured it out and was ready to start playing.
      Several years before this car ride, I recalled the words from another temporary friendship, another 'healer' and seasonal marijuana leaf sorter who advised me on her way out of town , to,: " play the Game, Sara, play the Game."

   What is this game, and how does one play?

I read recently some wild run-on poetry I found on-line, someone I had barely known in real time and yet who's blazing aliveness took me a moment to absorb, was no longer so. He had gone down piloting a small plane. His life made the news. This was someone who could insert himself into any small town surf culture tribe by using his relentless good nature, seemingly oblivious to the word kook.

  This goofy tongued wanderer could write such slam-on written works, I'm a little tongue tied describing it. He just,..dances up and down the American coasts with his prose, barely mentioning lust or rejection, save for a waitress who cold shoulders him. Surfers who won't lend him their wax, people that won't wave back.  Skipped lightly over the otherness of his choice to live purely, freely, coyly suggesting to a biology teacher that he ate the sea turtle eggs under his care. His hunger for life in general, ah that vast rumbling stomach, for bread and a board. He got a high off of writing poetry, sitting on a ledge, legs dangling  over an empty car park .
   
  All this unabashed freedom, yet at bonfires and parties, he still furtively  dumped out the beers that were handed to him and filled the bottles with water.

             That's playing the game. Just a little bit.


My mother told me, recently, that she never had to struggle with her identity. She was the wife of a professor, a mother, a potter and ( especially the wife of a professor part) her status in her community was accepted, unquestionably. Her upfront , frank acknowledgement of how things are;
                                     
                Oh Ma. That woman. When she meets Death, she will shake His hand and with a howdy do say " What next? I sure did life right".

     She done played the game, and won.
Self satisfaction, acceptance, the world falling away as you age and alls'  left is love, family, and a damn Soduku puzzle ; this trumps all.

That long gone friend , from the beach, she said to me once " I want to write a blog" .  I recall reacting dismissively, along the lines of saying the words "Why? What do you have to say?"
 
      Here is an aside to all of us who feel the need to offhandedly criticize other people's dreams, notions, ideas.
                        1 fuck you
                         2 keep doing it

If the target has any grit at all, they'll stubbornly cling to their dreams and ideas. I did . I hope she did too.

I hope she wrote that blog, I hope she's no longer playing anyone's game,  as life is not a 30 episode distraction from reality.
  This is a one shot deal.

I hope you, as the reader, know that you are part of someone's story, and that it is not personal, we are all threads in the Great Tapestry.

            How many cliches' can I throw out as I exit this entry?

                       It's not true, it's all true. Playah , play on.