Shoes in the Dryer

You know that sound of wet shoes clumping around in a clothes dryer?  That thump, thump, thump that echoes through whatever room, hallway, or end of the house no matter how many doors are shut?  Ideas do that in my head, round and round, sometimes spilling a story so sensory oriented that I cannot shut my ears to it.  That is what forces me to write sometimes. 

I find ways to deny this force most times, but some times it is too overpowering to deny its time on the keyboard.  It has kept me up when lay my head down to sleep.  It has kept me from being able to concentrate over dinner.  It has forced me out of bed at 3:30am and writing until I had to shower to go to work.  Those times where it has forced me to action have not been enough to establish a habit or a pattern of willingness to compose, so I find ways to dampen that noise.

My earliest memory of writing creatively was in second grade, where I was able to see an entire movie scene falling out onto a page in front of me.

Brief thoughts about the days of my youth

The days of my youth have been filled an adventure that spilled out my back door into fields that bordered the safety net of suburbia.  The emptiness of the woods and pastures contrasted with the other side of the fence, sharply with the houses in my neighborhoods, split-level and nearly identical.

Exploring the fields, felt like I was building my own world.  In my head I was going places that the friends who I was with were not, or at least that wasn't conveyed to me.  I saw possibilities of empires next to that pond, armies hidden in that forest wood.  Hidden dangers in that field of wheat.

The fields were slowly being developed into more houses and more civilization that was seemed pre-programmed and established, something that seemed to dismantle the world of possibility that I had built into my mind.  As the dirt piles that the construction equipment stacked and raked were, for a brief moment, my mountain to conquer.  The sides became giant berms to cycle my bike around, to pivot again and tackle an unleveled portion of earth.  All of my friends played “king of the hill” and played it like a game.  It made a bigger impression on me though.

I wasn’t just king of the hill.  I wanted king of the universe.  Not a king for power, but a king for freedom, because as the landscape changed around my house on the edge of suburbia, and the houses seemed huge in their conforming molds, bastardizing the freedom of the nature that it replaced, I sought to maintain the sense of possibility that I had when my earliest days of wilderness exploration began. 

This dismantling of the possibilities with the structure of normalcy, of repetition, of wealth and consumerism, left a great impression on me.  I had never discovered Thoreau or Emerson in my childhood, but I feel that I had gone to those fields deliberately, and that I was driving life into the corners to discover the possibilities of what this universe had to offer.  My youth was filled with the adventures in my mind that leave me less inclined to find that when I come to die, discover that I had not lived.