C.B. Potts's Blog, page 11

So Here I Am, With These Kids Of Mine

Ferguson is proving to be quite a game changer in my understanding of how people, especially some of those near and dear to me, think about things like race and humanity and justice. I've heard plenty about "those people" and how they can't be trusted to not tear up their perfectly good neighborhoods and all they're waiting for is an excuse to riot - god knows, they couldn't be working, people like that don't work.

When you respond with some facts - things like the fact that extrajudicial exec...

When People Show You Who They Are, Believe Them.

You may want things to be different. The people we imagine others to be can be profoundly different than who those people actually are. There is no amount of wanting that you can do that will transform someone from whom they actually are into who you want them to be. Acting as if people are the people you want them to be rather than the people they actually are creates many, many problems. When people show you who they are, believe them.

Even if this makes you sad.

Maybe especially if this make...

Rise and Shine, Rise and Shine, Rise and Shine

We must know the things that are good so we have the strength to confront the things that are bad. Today the sun is shining; Tim has the hood up on the black truck, peering into its innards the way a diviner does an undone sheep - the future, if it is there to be found, is missing intermittently. Which is rather how these things go.

Last night I slept solidly; I dreamed of trees being cut down, hay wagons close behind. Up and down the road today, loggers and the Amish go. It is the season for...

Free Association Friday

It's the fucking Candy Crush invites that do it, I think. Logging onto social media this morning where I've been spending all the time watching pictures of Ferguson, where I've been reading about reporters, in America, being arrested and gassed, to find X wants you to play Candy Crush, Y wants you to play Candy Crush, Z wants you to play Candy Crush.

Crowds of little kids, teenagers, young adults are out there, hands up, don't shoot. Military gear deployed on the streets (so it isn't wasted;...

Expectations, Excerbated.

If I knew my best work was behind me and I could not see the light of the next gig, I would do the same thing in a second. Which is not a popular sentiment, but it's a true one from where I'm standing. You think the work only bears you up? Oh no. The work tears you down. You pay for every bit of it in the end. This is an inherently fatal gig. Too bad it's the only way to live.

ETA: Obligatory sparkle pony post to be delivered tomorrow; I'm sure of it.

Thursday Morning

You're welcome.

Wednesday Morning

Yesterday's paranoid fantasies are today's headlines; MIT researchers, it seems, can spy on your conversation with a potato chip bag. The question is, of course, why they would want to. Most of the conversations I have with potato chip bags are trivial matters - nothing of real import; we've mused about how wondrous it would be to while away the afternoon in Spinoza's company and kvetched about eyeglass prices - the type of thing that is scarcely of interest to either of us, m...

Monday Morning

I want a cigarette. I want a cigarette not necessarily for the smoking, but for the having; there's a moment after the lighter's flared and you've drawn in that first breath where you lungs shudder and then relax, where all the tension melts for just a second, and you know that whatever is coming, you can cope with it.

I want a bottle of whiskey. I want it to stand here with me as I work today; proud and full as the sun comes up, less so as the day goes on. I want the ability to no...

Wednesday Morning

I have been brave; I have submitted a poem this morning. It's a very defiant poem, a very angry poem - I've only started reading the words of EliseM, who admonished us all recently to feel everything, to use everything, and this came from that. Way too long I have shied away from writing the raw bits, the painful bits, the parts of my head that will make people think I'm crazy; people do think I'm crazy, so there's no point in closing the barn door long after the horse wen...

Tuesday Morning, Thus Far

Goldsquare hit the nail right on the head when he talked about the paralysis of anger. I am a very angry woman; one of the things I'm currently angry about is I don't have the freedom to do the work I want to do in the way I feel it needs to be done. There's nothing to be done about this at the moment: when you have relatively small children, you can't just up and walk away and go wherever Story takes you. You can't get lost in the narrative and be gone, gone, gone until t...