Sue Perry's Blog: Required Writing, page 13

More Than States of Mind?

I like my absurdly early, outdoor exercise class because it lets me watch the sun come up. To me, every sunrise offers hope and promise – so seeing the sun rise starts my day right. I do my best to appreciate sunset, too, which brings me calm, an easing of the day’s stresses. When you think about it, it really is amazing that we have these glories to enjoy every single day!

Given the difference in psychological impact between sunrise and sunset, I would expect the two events to be readily distinguishable in my photographs. But I don’t think I could tell one from the other if I didn’t remember when I took the pictures. So maybe it’s not sunlight at a low angle that makes these times of day so special. Maybe it’s the quality of the air that has such distinct impacts on me each morning and evening. Or maybe it’s the sounds of all the birds who are so active as the sun rises or sets.

Or maybe the difference is all in my expectations.

Or maybe I am missing some obvious distinguishing feature of the photos. How about you? Can you tell which of the photos below show sunrise, and which show sunset? (Answers on page 2.)

Sunrise or sunset?

Sunrise or sunset?

Sunrise or sunset?

Sunrise or sunset?

Sunrise or sunset?

Sunrise or sunset?

Sunrise or sunset?

(The topic of a recent WP Weekly Photo Challenge was contrasts.)

Tagged: personal philosophy, photography, postaweek, sunrise, sunrise and sunset, sunset, Weekly Photo Challenge

A View That Ne’er Was?

I love this view, at once homey and exotic, a hipster modern remembrance of times long past – or maybe times that ne’er were: when I look at this I see a scene from the Bartimaeus* books.

Can you guess what you are looking at? Don’t answer suitcases, rugs, desk. Explain the why. The what’s it all for? Have a guess while you look at the photos, then scroll down below them for the explanation.

The full view.

Detail, looking left.

Detail, looking center.

Detail, looking right.

This scene was a window display, fleetingly, at an imported rug store on La Cienega Boulevard in West Hollywood, California. I am so glad I stopped to get these photos, because the store is gone now, vanished as quickly as it appeared. Out of business? Or transported? I like to think of it as thriving, Elsewhere.

* I refer to Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus trilogy, in which a precocious teen conjures a wisecracking demon to take on the magician power elite in a London that ne’er was. I lo-ove those books; in fact, they inspired me to try my own hand at writing fantasy…

(The topic of a recent WP Weekly Photo Challenge was contrasts.)

Tagged: Bartimaeus trilogy, Jonathan Stroud, photography, postaweek, Weekly Photo Challenge

The Ah in Normahl Life

Conference hotel bathroom. Some minimum wage worker kept these folded and stacked, all day long. Isn’t that just like a day job?

My last several weeks have been absurdly hectic, with long hours preparing for big to-dos at the day job. The deadlines and the events are now past, everything went well, I’m enjoying kudos for my efforts — and I’m trying to not resent the time I had to squander on mere work, the time I’ll never get back to do the things that matter: hang with my kids and my friends and the four-legs, visit the ocean or mountains, write my new book, promote my newly finished book, post to this blog.

During that time, I had to toss my tickets to two different concerts because I was too busy or tired to attend. That is a lot of alliteration and so wrong!

Ah. At last I’m home again. You know you’ve been gone too much when you look forward to sweeping the tumbleweeds of shed dog fur, new clumps of which are repopulating my living room even as I type this. So. Much. Fur. How can she not be bald yet?

Ah. Time to take a few lessons from folks who know how to relax:

 

Whatever your species, the morning sun feels good.

Tagged: blogging, home, pets, priorities, work, writing

Stairways to Somewhere Else

Something disturbs me about an extra long flight of stairs, especially going down. Why would that be? Maybe because I’m a klutz and fear falling. Certainly the former is true! On a recent trip to New York, I snapped a couple of extra-creepy flights.

Looking down a Manhattan subway escalator.

Perhaps long staircases disturb me because I fear my subconscious. The mystical psychologist Carl Jung talked about stairs that descend to the subconscious, as I was fascinated to recently learn. Well, okay, re-learn, because I was surprised to read it in (my own damn) novel, Was It A Rat I Saw, which I wrote a couple decades ago. But I digress. Anyway, I don’t fear my subconscious, I’m fascinated by all the things it seems to know that I don’t – and there’s no question that I get my best ideas from it!

Entrance to Le Poisson Rouge, a club in Greenwich Village.

I’m joking around. I know why some staircases bother me. It’s the sense that their steps are capable of taking me somewhere else, an unintended journey to an unexpected destination. Some building entrances feel that way to me, too. I’m finally exposing their truth in my fantasy series, FRAMES, where nothing in the universe is as it seems. The red staircase above will be a location – or maybe a character – in the second book in the FRAMES series, which I have just started writing.

New York doesn’t have a lock on eerie stairs. Here’s one that hails from Echo Park in Los Angeles:

P.S. I’ve finally finished the first FRAMES novel, Nica of Los Angeles. Watch for posts about that soon.

(This post responds to the WP Weekly Photo Challenge, Extra Extra.)

Tagged: Carl Jung, fantasy, inspiration, Le Poisson Rouge, novels, photography, postaweek, subconscious, urban photography, Weekly Photo Challenge, writing

Ever Wished That Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson Would Return to the Comics Page? Well, He Just Did.

sueperryauthor:

I thought he was making this up (yes, I have trust issues) until I saw the artwork in the three strips.

Originally posted on Pearls Before Swine:

Bill Watterson is the Bigfoot of cartooning.

He is legendary. He is reclusive. And like Bigfoot, there is really only one photo of him in existence. 

Few in the cartooning world have ever spoken to him. Even fewer have ever met him.

In fact, legend has it that when Steven Spielberg called to see if he wanted to make a movie, Bill wouldn’t even take the call.

So it was with little hope of success that I set out to try and meet him last April.

I was traveling through Cleveland on a book tour, and I knew that he lived somewhere in the area. I also knew that he was working with Washington Post cartoonist Nick Galifianakis on a book about Cul de Sac cartoonist Richard Thompson’s art.

So I took a shot and wrote to Nick. And Nick in turn wrote to Watterson.

And the meeting…

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An Adoration of Pelicans

A gaggle of geese. A leap of leopards. A covey of quail. My vet has a poster with line after line of phrases that describe collections of critters, in ever-odder terms. A dule of doves. A charm of finches. A deceit of lapwings. An unkindness of ravens. Perhaps my favorite is a siege of herons. (Surely the crawfish in a local pond see herons that way, even though there is only one heron that plagues them. No, wait, plague would be locusts.) Have all these phrases truly been used? Maybe not – but for a richer language, let’s start today! (To get us started, I include more of the phrases at the bottom of this post.)

If I were to add pelicans to the list of phrases, I would have to call them an adoration of pelicans. What a spectacular creature the pelican is. Sitting around a dock, it may look homely and awkward, but airborne, it rules the coast. Pelicans fly together in innovative formations, skim the waves fearlessly, dive with conviction – and always get their fish.

I’ve taken many pictures of pelicans. In most of them, the bird appears as a speck on my camera lens. Last weekend, two pelicans put on an amazing show as I walked the beach. For the first time, I saw two pelicans dive simultaneously and hit the water a few feet apart. But they were coy and whenever I raised my phone camera, they masqueraded as specks. This was the closest I got to a good picture, so you can imagine the others:

 

But I’ve had better luck in the past. Here are some pelicans enjoying sunrise on both coasts of the U.S.:

Pelican at sunrise, East River, NYC.

Pelicans at sunrise, Carlsbad Beach, San Diego County, CA

And here is a particularly fine squadron, which always reminds me of that Far Side cartoon. You know the one, right? Birds of prey know they’re cool.

My best capture to date was this … er ….

HOLY FRIGGING — I’ve just spent what feels like a year scrolling through endless directories of unsorted photo files, in an unsuccessful search for one of my favorite shots. Ho-kay. Check back to this post later, I will add the photo when/if I find it. Perhaps it is finally time to attempt to organize my photos.

And in the meantime, enjoy some more critter phrases:

A crash of rhinoceroses.

A gang of elk.

A singular of boars.

A cast of woodpeckers.

A barren of moles.

A shrewdness of apes.

A smack of jellyfish.

A parliament of owls.

(This post is slightly in response to the recent WP photo challenge, “Split-Second Story”.)

Tagged: beach, language, nature, ocean, pelicans, photography, sunrise, Weekly Photo Challenge, words

An Eavesdropper’s Guide to Compassion

Acquire more compassion. That is one of my top personal goals: to appreciate what another person is going through without the weight of pity or guilt. Or discomfort. Or disdain. I’d like to think I’m making progress but mostly I’m just aware of all the other reactions that sully the compassion. I want compassion unencumbered by other emotions. But perhaps single, pure reactions are not the way humans respond.

The other morning outside Starbuck’s, a youngish man was talking to himself. There is something distinctive about self-talk, you hear it and you know he’s not talking to a person or into a device. He walked rapidly without purpose, ricocheting from spot to spot. He had shoes cradled in his arms, but only socks on his feet. When he entered Starbucks, most everybody acted like he wasn’t there, but stiffened and you knew they knew. Fresh back from a week in Manhattan, I was skilled at ignoring him. He stood behind me in line for a while, muttering and rapping. He came up with some spectacular rhymes, and sounded surprised when his words fell into place. He was impossibly high, on what I dunno. I couldn’t tell whether he was having a good trip.

After he left, a woman in line had a mom moment and expressed concern about his heading toward traffic. I looked out at him and for the first time saw somebody’s son. Suddenly I felt like a crumb for not reaching out to him, maybe getting him to sit down for a spell. Without provocation, he sprinted up the street and away. The woman kept talking about him to all the workers and now it seemed like there was gossip in her caring, which disappointed me. The workers told her that cops had earlier been out to chat with him. I had happened into one short piece of a recurring cycle.

The other night on the subway I sat next to a pair who must have been friends, maybe mid-20s in age. The guy said to the gal, “Have you seen Brian lately? I really don’t like him anymore, he has turned into such a loser. All he wants to do is sit around at home.” (GIrl murmurs unconvinced noises.) “Shelly saw him in New York. He flew out there for an interview with a director about a big part.” (Tone of voice conveys jealousy and frustration – apparently Brian blew the opportunity.) “Shelly thought the same thing. He’s acting like a loser. You know his dad tried to kill himself last year.” (Not clear whether this is offered as an attempt to understand, or further proof of what a loser Brian is.)

By now I hate this guy and wish Brian had better friends. Later I bring myself around to thinking about the life experiences that shaped this guy and prevent him from perceiving that Brian’s behavior could reflect emotional devastation. I remember my 20s as a time of cavalier disregard for so many others. Maybe he’ll grow out of it. I’m pretty sure that I finally have, although disdain still comes way too easily to me.

Tagged: attitude, Buddhism, compassion, eavesdropping, motherhood, philosophy, psychology, spirituality

Local Color

Here in southern California, we didn’t have a winter. We had autumn, an extended spring, and now an early summer. In other words, we went from wildfire to pollen to smog season, skipping the mudslide/debris flow season this year.

They are subtle but we do have detectable differences from season to season. In the spring, the flowers have an intensity of color that they lose in summer, when it is too hot to be bright and everybody including flowers must fade and dim to survive the heat.

It is definitely still spring in the garden. The native sage is most brilliantly blue in the mornings before the sun hits:

Gray green leaves, purple-blue flowers, and a wondrous spicy fragrance – this sage has it all!

Spring is when this blue morning glory – a relentless, destructive weed – strengthens its hold on the neighborhood. The flowers are too lovely to remove:

Morning glory appears to crown this aloe. By mid-summer, its vines will have strangled the aloe if allowed to remain.

No one knows where this morning glory begins, it snakes from yard to yard, along phone lines, across fences. I’ve even found runners in my dark, dry garage! It looks especially pretty with the bougainvillea, though, doesn’t it?:

Another year of morning glory invasion begins.

As soon as the blooms wither, however, the vines must go, lest the rest of the garden vanish behind their twisting tendrils. Stylistically, the morning glory and kudzu have much in common.

Clearly my days as a plant nerd are over. I once knew the common and Latin names for this fellow, whose flowers glow even in brightest sunlight:

The … er… purple plant.

I don’t know what this flower is, either, but I have a better excuse. I discovered it in a neighbor’s yard today and have never seen one before. My guess is that it’s South African:

The… er… one with tall spikes of orange flowers.

My Channel Island Bush Poppy is one of my favorite plants. It is not supposed to fare well in my hot inland location, yet mine is 15 feet high and wide. It blooms profusely and cheerfully every spring. Best of all, it requires neglect. If I water it, it will die. The plant made for me!:

Care for this one at its peril!

All this blogging about my garden makes me realize I am overdue to do some gardening… Well. Those that can, do. Those that don’t feel like it, blog.

The WP Weekly Photo Challenge wants to see “Spring”.

Tagged: blogging, flowers, gardening, nature, postaweek, southern Californnia native plants, spring, Weekly Photo Challenge

Sna-ap! Crack! Russstle…. Repeat!

In my yard, Spring is a time of great destruction. All manner of flying insects flit by to tease the cats. The insects escape into foliage, the cats go after them. Typically, the insects escape harm but the foliage does not.

I’m saying cats but the main culprit seems to be Leo, an excessively large feline:

Only great Dog knows what poor small creature Leo stalks here.

Leo’s personality spans the range between goofball and doofus. Except when an insect is nearby, he is the quintessential gentle giant:

Leo displaying his most common approach to life: jus’ chillin’. Not yet trampled poppy in foreground.

The other day I saw him body slam a sage to nab a grasshopper. The grasshopper popped away, and Leo shot through several feet of leaves in futile pursuit. He left behind a sage with snapped branches and a hole in its greenery:

Memorize the damage to this sage. You will soon be asked to tap this memory.

Hmmm, thought I, recalling the backyard wisteria. It is mostly dense lush green, now that it has finished blooming:

It is like a cave inside this thick wisteria.

However, there is one hole, with snapped limbs:

Does this remind you of any damaged plant you have recently viewed?

I had previously assumed that a bear had somehow entered my backyard and fallen into the wisteria, because several thick sturdy limbs are broken:

Bear(?) damage to the wisteria.

However, after the incident with the sage, Leo has become the prime suspect in the wisteria attack.

As always, even if he confesses, punishment will be out of the question. He is just too cute. Here he is cuddling with Luna:

If there exists a cuter cat picture, please comment me the link!

The WP Weekly Photo Challenge wants to see “Spring“.

Tagged: cats, gardening, humor, pets, postaweek, Weekly Photo Challenge

Travelog: Cities With Snow

Long time ago, I had a boyfriend stuck in Michigan one winter and when he went outside one morning, it had been so cold that his car tires had frozen square. That is so. Awesome.

For this southern Californian, cold weather is a remarkable novelty. Those of you in places where winter is more than sweater weather may struggle to share my fascination.

In January, I went to Reston, Virginia and Manhattan. My trip occurred in between their brutal snowstorms of this winter, but I did get to see some snow, and experience single digit temperatures.

At my Reston hotel I thought, If only I’d brought my swimsuit! I didn’t know the hotel had a pool. Complete with lifeguard chair.

The Washington D.C. Amtrak station was warm and inviting:

I saw some regulars inside:

Through a bus window I saw the Potomac, an ice sheet with bridges:

My first night in Manhattan I saw no snow, just the usual thrilling sights of so many people in so small a space:

Here is what snow looks like outside Grand Central Station:

The Upper East Side had a more refined patch:

The wind came from between the buildings and made this visitor understand why no one else was in this park:

It was warm inside my hotel. Hotel corridors make me wish I’d never seen The Shining.

The January sky cast an austere glow:

New York is beautiful no matter what the conditions.

Tagged: New York, photography, postaweek, snow, travel, Virginia, weather, winter