She strode in a swarm of fireflies

This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today--explode--fly apart--disintegrate!   

- Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

Ahhh, don't let Tumblr distract you, Allie! (But the fandoms!) Focus!

Tonight I finished another short story--the second in as many weeks. It's only because this class has been sitting on my head, putting the pressure on me to do something, but I feel like Ray Bradbury. His book Zen in the Art of Writing (title is kind of misleading--it's the name of one of the essays contained within) has been a constant inspiration to me lately. It lights up that thing in my head that wants to write.

Maybe this blog can be my yellow pad and my Ticonderoga pencil, like Douglas Spaulding's setup in Dandelion Wine, to whittle down the truths found in a summer. I've been picking up truths off the trees like berries lately, new ideas I can set to distill.

At any rate, read poetry every day, he says somewhere in Zen in the Art of Writing. I'm pretty sure I do that anyway, but I nonetheless go to the library and get out a volume of Alexander Pope. He's slow going--he takes digesting, more so than Shakespeare--but the wisdom! The classical structure of the lines! I love him, even if I only have two bites a sitting. And then I flip to the beginning of Zen and read more carefully and I find out one of Bradbury's favorite poets was Alexander Pope. It's things like that that make me feel like Ray Bradbury knighted me in the same way Mr. Electrico knighted him, ignited him--live forever!

And then I went to the library today and found his other favorite poet, also one of my favorites and a key provider of the Bradbury DNA--Dylan Thomas. I had to chose between two volumes that both began I see the boys of summer in their ruin. Well, I don't want to be in my ruin. I write, Bradbury says, to know that I am not dead.

This line from Fahrenheit 451 keeps coming back to me--He strode in a swarm of fireflies. Which is to say, books, words, pages that have caught fire and gone up in tiny sparks.

Ferb, I know what we're gonna do today

I'm absent-mindedly reading on my Kindle, and Clair's on her iPhone. "I wish we had a hammock," I say, more to myself than anybody else.

"That'd be awesome," says Clair. "Hey, you should make one. I was just reading about how you can make a hammock with ropes and sheets."

"Sheets?"

"Yeah, they have instructions on Instructable.com and--come on, let's go outside and do it! Adventure!"

The above is almost a direct quote. I swear, sometimes she's like that girl in every movie who teaches the lonely bored guy that life is precious and exciting.

At any rate, we charged out there with old tablecloths and an incriminating-looking length of rope, and below is the result.

(I didn't actually get to sit in it myself, but tomorrow we build hammock number two. In the meantime we sit in the living room, mosquitoed but merry.)

Good times

How to have a fun day in summer (if you're me, at any rate):

Head out to meet some friends at an outlet for The Amazing Spiderman. However, the two sisters who are accompanying you forget to mention where the outlet actually is until it's too late for Mom, your long-suffering chauffeur, to make an earlier start. Cue feeling of relief that you had nothing to do with the planning process and therefore can't be blamed for your sisters' communication problems.

Get there in the nick of time. Unable to find your friends, you resign yourself to seeing them later and sit down to get your ticket's worth. You spend the movie mentally writing a review for your blog ("Andrew Garfield's Pete Parker manages to encapsulate both dorky and dangerous," etc.), but you'll never be able to actually write it, because halfway through the movie some mad scientist fellow injects himself with DNA and undergoes a horrible transformation. You, unable for some reason to mentally separate science fiction from potential reality, get sick and have to be lead from the theater by your sister, face turned downward so you don't have to look at the screen and the horrors emblazoned thereon.

Fortunately it turns out that the rest of your friends came late and couldn't get tickets, so they're just killing time in the outlet. They're the type of people who are more fun than a movie anyway, so after you've stopped furtively examining your arms to see if someone rearranged your DNA while you were off your guard, you hit the outlets with them. And it couldn't be better. They try on sunglasses because they can. They buy you french fries. They run around in a Spiderman mask that Timmy apparently purchased for just such an occasion. Then they all hit the novelty candy store and get bric-a-brac such as Bertie Bott's Beans, to say nothing of a rather large gummy bear on a stick which you buy your sister Clair as a surprise for tomorrow. (You can post about this all you like, because Clair never reads your blog. Muahahahaha.) Chocolate? No, you don't buy any chocolate. Theresa and Timmy have already bought chocolate and are carrying it around in Theresa's bag, since they figure there's probably graham crackers, marshmallows and a fire in their future.

Then, find your sisters, wander around a bit, narrowly miss the Hogwarts Express (in reality a bunch of shopping carts linked together), and go to a record shop.

Then everyone repairs to the Fox's house and has an excellent dinner, followed by s'mores. You have tea, and you force Theresa to drink it with you as a thank-you because she made you cookies. (She doesn't even really care for tea, but where friendship is concerned this is totally irrelevant.) There are thumb wars. Then you talk books with Moira Fox, which makes your day because you like all kinds of relatively-obscure English novels and only she understands. Also, she's an (amazing) artist. This is a great thing, because art, like common sense, fascinates you even as it coyly eludes your ability.

The next day you write a lengthy blog post about all this for some reason, written in second person, and finish by thanking your mom for driving all over the place to make it happen. (Not that she didn't love doing it.)

NOTE: I'm mostly only posting this because I'm bad at keeping up a diary and I want to put my blog to use a little bit. If you weren't there, you may take it for granted that I wish you had been. :)

Morning Person

I have a tricky time of it, kickstarting a morning. A cup of tea is always essential, of course, but where to go from there?

I mean, I'd love to hang around taking bad photos of the teacup in question and uploading them to Instagram, but I'm told that some people do this thing in the morning called "getting dressed".

Now, I can never decide on an outfit, especially since I'm closetly-challenged and everything I own tends to require ironing from being left in the wrong place. This is a problem that I've surely got the brains to correct, but I can't make those same brains stick to the process of doing so. My brains are too busy floating through the stratosphere, plucking bits of cloud. Which I suppose is educational, in its way.

As for the rest of me, I looked in the mirror and realized that my hair had decided to look good all on its own for once. So I haven't touched it. Why ruin a good thing?

Ah, I love a morning in summer.