a fourth approach

I am still framing the day playfully. [though this was supposed to be a run-on sentence.] The elements were tasks on the list in my mind. And then loose threads of being in a town I left almost a decade ago where I had 30-year roots. They still show up. A college town changes, but some of the characters remain the same or recycle. I walked into 411 for dinner and thought Heidi was at the bar; only she isn’t a member of this cast. The conversation brought to life a few friends who have been dead a long time. I know people who have been dead for nearly 30 years. I am fascinated.

I knew that one of my first boyfriends had ended up with a blueberry farm in the northwestern part of the state. I think he told me that the last time we unexpectedly ran into each other. I had been thinking about him in the way that someone can be remembered without personal details, because a week ago I had eaten lunch in his hometown. I hadn’t been there, for even longer.

The morning developed around the theme of not wanting to get out of bed and I decided to play at indulging myself with heavy eyelids. I lightly wondered why I was still lethargic, but ended up reading for an hour about the brain and pain and education in three different sources. Eventually a shower was more inviting than bed. During my stretches I was particularly curious about the further stretch of my Achilles tendon. Breakfast had the extra treat of a few homemade raisins.

I don’t know why I get such a kick out of the sour candy–like taste of my Washington raisins. But from the beginning they have brought me a joyful zing. I want to jump up and down and say "I made these, are they great?"

Remembering that John Scott had asked me who was going to help me deal with the mess in West Virginia, I decided to enlist my brother’s help in filling the Andrew’s lane pothole. I still wonder about the natural formation of potholes. There must be certain knowledge about this. A few shovels and brooms, some broken cinder block and we were well on our way. In fact we were done very soon. Ray mostly checked something on his blackberry.

I decided that banks were the task of the morning. I suddenly had the urge and energy to roll up max’s damaged Polaroid pulls from his 60th birthday party that had been altered by the fire in Hinton. So although I didn’t get out of the house until noon, I did manage to visit 3 banks and one post office and copy center and accomplish five nested tasks. There was something about walking down the street and seeing the college town as it reinvents itself for the next set of students. This seems obvious rather than nostalgic. The panhandlers still rub me a little wrong. While in the copy center an odd fellow came in and overhearing his comments, I had to wonder about his sanity. It almost inspired a playful inquiry into the not all accounted for characters that a town supports. And that made me think back on the panhandlers and their stories. I felt like a town could have a portfolio of characters that everyone knew. It seemed to playfully promote safety rather than compromise the right to anonymity.

In my own quirky way I was getting glue from the copy shop to use on old stamps that had gotten all stuck together in a safe that some possibly quirky fellow had had in his house in DC and that had become the responsibility of the real estate agent to remove. I became the user, reuser, recycler of these stamps. Since they had to be soaked they didn’t meet a standard of philatelic interest. I was using some of these stamps to finally send a scoutmaster in Texas some other stamps for his troop. This man, also a physician had contacted my lawyer brother for some unknown reason and solicited stamps from him. My brother was uninterested though I was quite amused to think that there was finally somewhere to send vast numbers of x-plicates that had begun to fill more and nore space. Although I don’t know this man I included a note to document the times I ha tried to send this envelope over the past year. I had lost his address when my hard drive died, as we say. And I had been surprised to find an envelope that he had sent to confirm he was still doing this project with the scouts. Of course this year’s hard drive crash almost threatens to force a repeat of last years dancce of the envelope without an address, but part of the back up saved his address. So I can only hope he gets a kick of the energy required to supply him with said stamps.

The woman at the post office looked familiar and I asked her how long she had worked there. Did she say 37 years, with Friday being her last day? She liked the old stamps, which reminded her of when she started working at the post office and the rate was 8 cents for a first class stamp.

I went over toward the other bank and was distracted by a photo and the word ‘Hapa.’ Having links to Hawaii the word immediately evokes “hapa haole,“ the term for mixed ethnicity. Sure enough some guy in L A has a traveling show of photographs of mixed ethnic humans with hand written text below their image about how they answer who they are? I think the question is frequently asked as to what are you of anyone we can’t immediately place by appearance. I was delighted with his work and the way it was displayed and how I had stumbled across it and taken the time to explore it. It inspires an oral history project in Hawaii: Are we what we remember?

On the walk home, which took me along a route I used to walk everyday for years, I came to a sudden construction block with no path around. I had to retrace my steps. I had an intuition some path would be blocked, I had no idea how blocked it might be. Along the reroute, I picked up two crushed cans and wondered about the value of a single recycled aluminum can. They remain an icon of our time. The crushed form speaks as well. Which king paid more than the price of gold for a set of Aluminum utensils? When did it become cheaper to reuse aluminum than mine it from Bauxite? Did I drive through bauxite mines at the border of South Dakota and Wyoming in the Riley 1.5? Those photos are sadly lost; part of the first hard drive crash. The Riley continues to run.

I stopped in at Fine Feathers at University Square after I noticed it again last week. The store had been new in my first years here. It was like walking onto some kind of stage. I saw no one, then after a moment I realized there were two women sitting to the far left. One spoke. I asked how long the store had been there and who had started it; how long they had worked there. They answered my questions. They were of another age in some way. The age that wasn’t fully extant when the store opened, I imagined. I think we were each charmed by the other. 34 years she said and she had worked there from the beginning for the owner. What wonderful and possibly grotesque stories of dresses and the people who wore them…
I came home to write this, enjoying peanut butter on rice cakes and a little Point Roberts dried fruit leather.
We’ll go and swim for 45 minutes this evening as a conclusion to the day's play. The love of life is in the details. Was it playful? So it seems to me.

a third approach

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

first next thoughts on play

just past the equinox
painting two hours a day
hot dogs at the golf course cafe at point roberts

this is a new attempt to put my ideas about play in a format that can be found on the internet.

what i realized in my exploration of play, is that it takes a certain attitude to experience life playfully. all my attempts to make exercises that enhance a sense of the healing, required a playful attitude toward the exercises i suggested. that meant that a person could be playful or not. this caused a certain sense of disappointment. (not experienced playfully.) and so i set the exercises aside.

now, i believe that people who have a playful spirit can explore these ideas and see if a healing sense of balance ensues.

a second approach: becoming the play auto mechanic

this text sat for over a year, but now i know how to set it up, thanks to noel.

today i drove the saab up another gravel road and dislodged the muffler from the manifold. i could have cried, but suppressed the urge. i was miles up the gravel. No other traffic. i really didn't like this game. though three people stopped and asked if they could help. i ended up tying a rope around the clamp and threading it through the back of the engine around some supports. i turned around. i made it several miles before i had to tighten the rope, due to scraping on road rocks, and near paralyzing fear. when i got back to marblemount i called dennis. and he said that's what he would have done and that aside from the noise the car would be fine. oh, how i hate the engine's growl.
after complaining elegantly at my lost hike on the most beautiful day of october up the hidden lakes trail. i again went under the car and after unwrapping the rope and fetching some copper wire. i pushed with my shoe to align the pipe before i wrapped the wire, and the pipe fit back together, snug enough to make me feel like i could drive three hours home. amazingly, the engine growl calmed, tamed engine.
fixed by playfulness, i mused i took a walk on the river and found a fire pit where i found fishing notions and made a set of false flies. i got chilled. but the happiness soothed all despair.

a first approach: wobble

, wobble

WOBBLE

An introDuction
that was once a Conclusion

Sometime in a past summer the word “wobble” starts to appear in my thinking. I write another draft of my play book and I need a way back into the subject. While staking rocks upon each other, a loose tooth 'kin dof' play suggests: a sense of balance about to occur. Unlike the loosening of the tooth, this becomes a fitting into place of an element. I move a little and subtly I can move my hand away and the stack stands. My breath separates from the stones. Here begins an offering.

In summer Valentino suggests to me that writing a play book ought to be playful and I have to admit that the play has drifted out of the project. It waddles out to the river we watch as we talk and swims off into the darkening evening. I recommit to write about play playfully. He has suggested that writing about failed attempts to write about playfulness might be interesting. Some description of the experience could provide hints and clues surrounding playfulness: a lengthening nine year mystery.

I laugh inside, Shelly is suggesting a writers' group to get me going again. I hear the critical voice in the back of my mind clear its throat. Can a cynic be playful? Can a wobble leave in place the underlying intent to engage? My writing self, oversensitive to criticism, determines to pretend to start again. The point: ah, to keep at it in some form and to discover what playfulness in writing feels like. Just as in everyday life, nudging a playful response, living on a playful bias,
simply living simply respectful of resources'
aware that much of this struggle occurs still in a lap of luxury
compared to the rest of the wonderful inhabitants of this planet.

So if our priorities lean more toward the quality of life rather than some measure of quantity, then I extend an invitation on a jaunt, exploring the things that I use to make my life more playful. While on this personal journey I encourage others to discover a personal more playful path.

I turned my life upside down, that's not necessary, just wobble something loose and balance it anew. Maybe eat dessert first at least a few times and figure out if a spoonful of dessert up front makes an attitude about something a bit sweeter.

John asked me when I write, and I mumble something because of course I haven’t been writing and have no idea when I will be writing again, and here it comes again a writing time and I relax and rather happily return to the subject: wobbles.


In earlier drafts I found myself preoccupied with ideas that remained flat. I don’t pretend to think of this as the last writing, but I do like to notice that certain ideas over time have expanded in unexpected ways, for instance the notion of a wobble. Or I prod the way we use the words play and work. I really wanted to provide a bunch of play exercises until I realized that I can do things in a playful way; and I can do the same things in a flat dull way; and they are, of course, the same things.

What 'kindo f' wobble is this. The same work or play activity can be play or work for different people and the same activity can sometimes be one or the other for the same person. Does an attitude and a feeling at a given moment form a wobble? I am a cleaner-upper kind of guy; and when the dishes and dust pile up, I feel cleaning as an unpleasant chore. If I clean here and there as I go, I find I like the sense of rendering order and making clean. Rarely I pour a closet out on the floor and clean it all up, so you wont find me there with any predictability that I recognize. The goal of this offering supports more of the unpredictable. The quality of the unpredictable in play doesn’t lend itself to careful scrutiny or containment in written words. Of course, that basically would be predictable.

I read that there doesn’t seem to be any scientific basis for a benefit of play. I wouldn’t attack science for that, I would just support the notion that some things remain qualitatively illusive and worth support as they exist. But not everything, respect a balance and that allow for the wobble.

In the working mechanism of machinery a slight wobble allows the gears to get from stand still to motion. Apparently the universe contains many wobbles: the earth on its axis, the moon in its orbit. the tide along the surfaces of the shore. How wonderful to find some quality of the big picture based on a wobble. So in the workings of the universe we have a give and take that doesn’t negate the structural laws of life but adds a certain quality to the whole. That’s what I want to explore, ways of adding a certain quality to the whole, through wobbles.

By introducing wobbles I find that I have a better sense of belonging more of the time. Some times I feel like I am trying to get away with something, but mostly that "getting away' from reminds me that I find little support for what I do. I intend to improve the quality of my life in a most simple way I can imagine. I hope to be more and more playfully present for what happens now. I reject more fear, though I can sense how fear confuses. I become suspicious of more wealth, though I can sense how wealth seduces. I suspend owning more stuff though I can sense the addiction. I will remain addicted to fitting things together simply and not wasting so much of the planet's resources hopefully sensing the fun wobbles as I proceed.

I make it sound like I have a bigger plan, which I don’t. I make it sound like I have some major answers, which I don’t. But I have this idea about the wobble and where it gets me, and I hope it can get more and more of us somewhere where we truly like being, so we don’t feel like we have to take something away from someone else in order to have fun and sense satisfaction.

I have several other rules I play by. Only I have to say that these aren’t rule rules. Call them criterion governing experience.

I hope that the humor I sometimes feel as I play with objects will seep into the text. So far I'm not convinced, but that remains one of the story's mystery.

When I play I give up on certain aspects of life and invest my attention in a similar though separate set of beliefs and expectations. A little surprise forms at times as I lose my position. I start again to develop
positive playful experiences. I imagine readers that make similar discoveries. Doesn't play seep into behavior with a bit of consistent encouragement?

My first rule of play: Do what you want to do first first. Something about us as members of an animal kingdom gives us some kind of access to an order different from socialization, not to judge socialization as bad, but rather that some of us have become over socialized, while others of us have failed to become adequately socialized. The over socialized postpone frequently the thing we would rather do first. The under socialized create a different mess. It may be a bias of observation, but I find if I do what I want to do first, the rest gets done more easily, sometimes in far less time. I am playing.

My second rule: Order something in my immediate environment. I don’t necessarily have to complete this ordering because it usually leads to some other interesting invitation that I want to explore. Or I may only order up to a point before I want a different order.

When I see my way to another project, I try not to tell myself to wait. Usually I hear that voice in my head and have to lightly calm it down. No particular order informs how I play. I have taken to leaning projects against walls, or piling them up somewhere, so I have access to them when engagement resumes.

A third rule: Be involved in more that one activity before completing an earlier one. This seems counter to getting things done, but my experience reveals the opposite. More gets done and I spend less time pondering when I might get to something. Not that I don’t do plenty of pondering, just that frequently I notice it lacks interest and move on. I also find that sometimes some thing serves as the lead activity for another activity. And that that second activity really brings the greater satisfaction. Sometimes even the second thing provides something that makes the first thing easier to complete.

A fourth rule: Everything you need presents itself, or stands near by. I marvel at what can be used to solve problems when the right stuff eludes my grasp. I frequently make up uses for things for which they were never intended. In fact some surge of joy expresses itself when this happens. I also find that the small piece of what I need just happens to be around when I need it, so that I dont need more material to create what I need. Some of these extra pieces become pleasant reminders of this process. Of course, I would be the kind of person who likes the worn and mended rather than the new and shiny.

I have a certain oppositional nature and a certain distrust of the status quo. Simply, it doesn’t comfort me. That constructed center doesn’t reflect who I am, so I often find comfort in doing quirky things. I make up rules for a while; and then I change them. Not to exclude anyone, just to hone my awareness. I don’t really know if anyone feels good about being like everyone else, mostly I assume most of have varying degrees of similarity and difference unlike a constructed normal.



The most recent rule of play: Once I tell a story about how I enjoy something, I bare false witness. Strangely what I thought I enjoy shifts slightly to challenge and reveal a new story. I no longer do enjoy that exactly in that way. Play seems very flexible. It makes for inconsistency; probably the rules only approximate the experience.

So the rule might be that when you believe something, loosen up the perspective to embrace the wobble. Allow for growth and change. Believe loosely.