Hoarded Ordinaries

According to this site, even a surface perusal of my blog reveals me to be “cool” and “new agey.” Well, shucks…I guess y’all found out my hidden “cool” side (although I’m not so sure about the “new agey” part). Does this mean I was less cool (and potentially more “old agey) before I started this blog?

And while we’re talking links, check out this site. Apparently my entry on campaign signs (along with Kathleen’s entry over at Unsettled) caught the eye of someone at a signage company. Does this mean that a lucrative corporate sponsorship of “Hoarded Ordinaries” is right around the corner?

Here’s a side of New Hampshire you won’t see on the primary night news coverage: the back side. This is the Keene Industrial Heritage Trail, the official name for the bikepath that wends along the abandoned railroad bed not far from my apartment. If you walk about a mile down this trail, you’ll end up at Depot Square in downtown Keene; back in October, we saw Howard Dean grip-and-grinning his way down Main Street near Depot Square. I walk the dog nearly everyday along this trail, but I’ve never seen any sort of candidate campaigning here; today as on any day, this far-flung portion of the Industrial Heritage Trail is off the political beaten path, far from weary-eyed candidates and sign-waving out-of-staters.

Chris and I voted early this morning at a nearby school. There is something cheering about elections. Apart from the obvious swell of patriotic pride that voting inspires, I love the simple civic-mindedness of the folks, mostly volunteers, who tend voting places. I am heartened by the commitment of folks who willingly spend the day checking names off registration lists, filling out paperwork with first-time voters, or showing people how to put their ballot into a scanning machine unused since last November.

Since Chris and I have never voted in Keene, we had to register at the polling site. The pair of women who helped us were jovial as they asked various required questions: place of birth, last place where we’d been registered, etc. We’d brought documentation to prove our address here in Keene, but we still had to sign a sworn affidavit claiming a New Hampshire domicile. As Chris and I raised our hands and repeated the official words declaring that we live in New Hampshire, in Keene, at the address we’d given on the forms, I joked with the two election workers: “When else except today do you get to use the word ‘domicile’ in casual conversation?”

On our way out of the polling site, we passed a strategically-placed PTA bake sale. It was early, so the pickings were good; we bought a donut and a cookie for grand total of 50 cents. “Keep the change,” Chris said as he handed a dollar bill to the PTA member working the goodie-laden table; she seemed thrilled to have made a whopping 50-cent profit. It strikes me as odd that these two vital activities–voting and caring for schools–are tended by volunteers: in this, the world’s greatest nation, we seem to have our priorities backward, relying on cookies and donuts to subsidize our children’s education and asking unhired guns to preside over the selection of our Commander in Chief.

Perhaps this is the real backside of Keene, the truly unbeaten path. For good or ill, the things that really matter are the province of the dedicated few who give enough of a damn to do their job whether the rest of the world, peering through TV cameras and listening through boom-mikes, notices or (after tomorrow) cares.

Kathleen at unsettled has posted a great picture of the sign-waving campaign supporters who took over the Keene town square this past weekend. Go over and check out a great glimpse of our local color… (You’ll want to click on her picture to view an enlarged version.)

Last night we went to hear John Edwards speak before one of two packed houses here in Keene. I found Edwards to be articulate, sincere, and likable. His vision of citizens working together to bridge the gap betwen the “two Americas” was inspiring, a welcome change from the usual cynicism. In comparing his hope for America to the optimism of both FDR and JFK, Edwards didn’t sound arrogant: instead of boasting of his own accomplishments, he pointed time and again to the promise of the American people. Although he didn’t have time to answer formal questions, a crowd of people pressed forward at the end of his speech; as Chris and I left the building, Edwards was pressing the flesh and looking eminently presidential.

And need I say that Edwards is remarkably good-looking, too? Even Chris agrees, as did various women we overheard in last night’s crowd. Yep, that’s a fine looking man: this photo doesn’t do him justice.

Last night I was too wakeful to sleep but too tired to work, so I began re-reading pages from my hand-written journal, the first step toward writing my next issue of Pedestrian Thoughts. In the process I came across the following paragraph, written on January 1, that I think directly relates to blogging:

I’m reading Nigel Nicolson’s biography of Virginia Woolf, and at several points he notes how voluminously VW wrote, maintaining heavy correspondence and keeping a journal in addition to all the essays, review, and novels she produced. And in all this, Nicolson writes, Woolf rarely repeated herself, rarely borrowed a line from a letter to flesh out an essay or vice versa. And so the joy of Woolf’s incredibly fresh prose–the sense that words spontaneously flow from mind to pen without any sort of restraint or intermediation–seems corroborated by this fact: Woolf’s writing was indeed fresh because her mind itself was supple and ever active, never wanting for ideas or inspiration because it simply received then recorded spontaneous thought and experience like a raw nerve.

Ever since I began keeping a hand-written journal in high school, I’ve worried about pumping the well dry: what do you write about when you run out of ideas? This fear grew stronger when I started writing my Pedestrian essays, then it grew even more when I started keeping this blog: if I keep writing, writing, writing, at what point will I run out of ideas? At what point will readers notice that I’m repeating myself, rehashing the same old themes over and over?

Nicolson’s comment about Woolf was heartening. Although Woolf was gifted with a genius beyond mine, it’s encouraging to think that even she couldn’t run the well of creativity dry: the more she wrote, the more had to write about. Elsewhere in his biography, Nicolson (the son of Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s friend and sometimes lover) mentions how Woolf once asked him and his brother to recount the precise details of their morning: what kind of light streamed through their bedroom window when they first awoke; which sock did they put on first when dressing, the left or the right? “It was a lesson in observation,” Nicolson writes, “but it was also a hint: ‘Unless you catch ideas on the wing and nail them down, you will soon cease to have any.'”

I can only imagine what Virginia Woolf’s blog would have looked like had she kept one; in my own private dream-world, I envision Woolf and Emily Dickinson, two of my favorite fertile minds, living together somewhere in a land where both could write and blog unmolested, in a society that could fully appreciate and support female minds of their ken. In the meantime, I’ll trust that blogging is one way of catching then pinning ideas on the wing; the more you capture or at least chase, the more come flying your way, willlingly and even joyously flinging themselves into your net of words.

Here’s a daytime photo to accompany last night’s blog entry. Notice the all-American juxtaposition of sign-toting campaign supporters, yellow “bring home the troops” lamp-post ribbons, and the town flagpole with American, New Hampshire, and POW flags. This morning the Square was crawling with Dean, Kerry, Kucinich, and Clark supporters along with one half-frozen dog-walker with camera in one hand and leash and doggy-doo bags in the other. (I am, after all, a model citizen even if I don’t stand on a street corner and wave a sign to that effect.)

The Kerry folks have rented a campaign office in an old factory down the street from my apartment; the abandoned lot next door was filled with parked cars from New York, Connecticut, and (of course) Massachusetts. Although I’ve never been the pep-rally, sign-waving type, preferring to remain aloof while humming a cynical rendition of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” even I have to admire the commitment of folks who would drive all the way to Keene, NH to stand outside and freeze their sign-gripping fingers off. As I overheard one Keenester remark to another, “This is the most excitement Keene’s seen since, well, four years ago!” Seeing people–especially young people–who are pumped up over politics is an encouraging thing. A tip of my fuzzy-with-fake-fur hat to all the sign-wavers; as my Gram D would have said, “God love ’em!”

New Hampshire’s headed back into the deep-freeze tonight. Around dinner time I drove around Central Square to run an errand or two. Even inside the car, it was cold; my fingers inside fleece-lined leather gloves were numb. Yet the campaign groupies were out in full force: college kids swarmed Central Square–the traffic-thronged heart of Keene–waving signs for Dean, Kerry, and Kucinich.

The Dean supporters were a particularly active bunch. One chap was walking in and out of traffic with several yard-signs attached to a long wooden rod: a walking political totem-pole. One cluster of campaigners waved home-made signs declaring “The Doctor is In.” And another handful was circling the Central Square rotary with a huge Dean banner, crossing in front of traffic at each intersecting street, smiling and waving.

The Kucinich & Kerry supporters were far less ambulatory, having peppered the Square and Main Street median with signs and banners, next to which they stood and waved energetically. It was dark, motorists were hurrying home from work, and it was brutally cold. And yet these campaigners, most of them college-aged, seemed thrilled to be waving signs at indifferent drivers. One Kerry supporter held her sign while bouncing and shouting like a cheerleader, presumably to keep warm.

I’ll be voting in the primary on Tuesday, but I’ve yet to decide who to support. In the meantime, tonight I faced a more pressing and perplexing decision. One sign-toter walked right in front of my car as I turned from West onto Main Street; his sign read, “Honk for Kerry!” And so, an ethical dilemma. As an undecided voter, should I have honked or not? I have no beef against Kerry, but I refuse to be tricked into supporting anyone: had I honked, it would have been in anger at the walker (“Get outta the way, punk!”), not in support of his sign. In pausing, I voted in favor of inaction: someone else honked at the errant jaywalker, who then dashed safely onto the sidewalk.

Frigid temperatures and wind-chills aside, there’s plenty of hot air in New Hampshire these days. Despite the wind and cold, this is one election that’s still hotly contested.

Today here in New Hampshire we experienced a minor miracle: the temperature rose (briefly) to above freezing. Reggie and I celebrated the occasion by walking at the airport, where sun illuminated partly blue skies. By the time we got home, though, it was snowing–sideways.

Yesterday Shelley at Burningbird featured a link to a list of ten mistakes writers should work to avoid. This is a great list of “don’ts,” but let me add an eleventh: never read a list of writing mistakes and then re-read something you’ve written and posted for the world to see…

After reading Mistake # 1 about repeated “crutch” words, I re-read yesterday’s blog-entry, Sleeping with Strangers. Although I was aware of my fondness for the words “inevitable” and “inevitably,” I hadn’t noticed how many times I used these two words in this single entry. Yikes! Someone hand me a thesaurus, pronto!

I’m not sure what this fondness for the word “inevitable” says about my psyche. Maybe I really do believe in fate: despite my protestations that we can and do control our lives, maybe at heart I’m a fatalist. “It’s all inevitable: just accept the hand you’re dealt!” Maybe I’m a sucker for over-generalization: if one thing is true, then “inevitably” a second, third, and fourth related thing must be true, too. Or maybe I really do believe that everything we say and do boils down to time, a limited resource “inevitably” doomed to depletion. Even when I was a child, I knew that our days were numbered, that we should pay as close attention to life as we possibly could because soon enough it would “inevitably” be over.

A guidance counselor once told me I had a “terminal” outlook because I was always looking forward to the end of things. Like many teens, I looked forward to the end of class, the start of spring break, and the freedom of graduation. If this is true, then I think many or most of us have “terminal” outlooks: isn’t impatience the human condition? I beg to differ with my guidance counselor’s claim that looking forward to the end of something is necessarily, even “inevitably,” bad: if you know your time is short, might not this lead you to cherish the few days you have? Instead of being morbid, might not an acknowledgment of death, our “inevitable” end, be a positive thing, a note of realism that leads us to live our lives as fully as possible?

I’m not sure on this count, but I know that whenever I set pen to paper or fingers to keys, “inevitable” is one of the words that, well, inevitably flows out. And so just as I am perpetually on the lookout for the various habits I “inevitably” fall into–starting paragraphs and sentences with “And so,” for instance, or interrupting myself too often with phrases like “for instance,” or using too many commas and semicolons, or writing too many complex sentences that, like this one, include huge nested parentheticals set off by Dickinsonian dashes–now I will be on the lookout for “inevitable” and “inevitably.” I still am enamored with this word and what it means: I won’t be able to give it up entirely. But maybe I can wean myself from it gradually, limiting myself to one or two inevitable “inevitables.”

In the meantime, I know that I should never re-read a blog-entry after it’s posted. Perfectionists always find mistakes in their own writing. It’s inevitable.