Day 13 & 14: No Mush and Scratch

Hello fellow blogrimagers, family and friends!

Today I got more than 6 hours of sleep! Which is fantastic since the past couple of days I haven't been getting that much from staying up late playing 'Nertz' with friends (if you don't know this card game you need to know), updating the blog, or catching up on some tv shows that I have missed (namely House, Stargate Universe and The Office).

Getting to bed at midnight and waking up at 5:40 am doesn't lead to a healthy sleep lifestyle...

Anyways, today's topics are a little more straight forward then yesterdays. We have No Mush and Scratch.

In No Mush, our dear friend Natalie Goldberg brings up a interesting point. That, "in order to write we must have an awareness of who we are- and who we aren't."

She goes on to say that writing is usually the pursuit of two opposites trying to make peace with each other, to become unified, but not to the point of, "mush."

What is mush? Mush is what happens when we compromise. An example that Goldberg gives is you have a girl that loves to live in the country, but is married to a guy that is an 'urban boy." Now, instead of either one submitting themselves to the other and embracing the challenges of a whole new culture, lifestyle and atmosphere... they decide to buy a house in the suburbs. Thereby "squashing" any desire and energy you may have gotten from either of the other extremes.

What is the challenge for today then? Write about bold, restless extremes that you carry inside. Go. Ten minutes.

No Mush

Bold restless extremes...

The biggest thing within me right now (or, on second thought, two of them) is traveling the nations of our world, and creating work through visual methods; i.e. drawing, sketching, painting, sculpting, printing, making pots, designing buildings and houses...

How do these come to a bold, restless extreme? Because at present I am not doing any of them.

Like the couple in this chapter that could live in the country or could decided the embrace of living in the city... each decision one person becomes deprived of a desire within them, but are faced with a livid opportunity to expand their experiences to a place that they have never known before.

The restlessness with can be attributed to the fact that I love to travel; I love seeing new places, experiencing how people live in different parts of the world and coming to regard strangers from a distant land as my friends (and let's not forget about the food!).

But I haven't been able to travel anywhere in about a year.

Creating, when I was at school, every semester I had an art class; painting, charcoal drawing, pottery, photography, screen printing, you name it... if it was an art class I took it and usually at least twice.

I remember the first day I had charcoal drawing, we used our hands to smear the charcoal across the paper and then used out erasers to create an image.

I remember coming home and feeling so alive, so excited, that my hands were covered in a thick cake of charcoal dust.

There was almost a glee to how I felt.

But it has been sometime since then...

Times Up.

Out next chapter:

Scratch

Write about a time you itched. It could be physical or metaphorical.

I remember being about 12, it was summer time because mosquito's don't come around when it's cold.

I had just spent the day playing outside.

The folks had us all come in for dinner.

All through dinner though, my legs itched like no tomorrow. I looked down and saw about 5 or 6 bites on my leg but I didn't think anything about it and decided that I would ease the itch by scratching it.

After we had finished eating I started heading to my room to get ready for bed. The itch on my legs would not go away and I was walking down the hallway I was scratching my legs like crazy (note: wearing shorts outside without bug-spray during a Missouri summer is usually a bad idea most of the time).

As I was going about my room getting ready for the night, I kept stopping what I was doing to scratch this itch... it was starting to get late out, the cicada's were being to strum their bed time song and it was getting darker and darker in my room.

My legs were so itchy, like someone taking pinpricks across my leg.

I remember going into my closet to put something away and turning on the light. As I looked down at my leg to see why it was itching so much, I had discovered that the 5 or 6 bug bites that I had from outside, now had become one, giant bug bite that seemed to have swallowed all the the little ones together.

A huge lump of itchy flesh.

I was horrified! I knew my folks had always told us not to itch bug bites, but I had no idea that they would grow so much... and the itch was even worse!

The night, as I laid in bed, my legs were restless. I prayed and prayed and prayed that I would fall asleep, so that this torture of an itch would leave em alone.

But that night I determined to myself that no matter how bad the itch got, that I wouldn't scratch it anymore. No matter how much I wanted to relieve what my legs were telling me to do, what my mind was screaming at me to somehow find a way to make it stop.

I held firm, I told myself over and over again that if I didn't scratch this terrible itch for the rest of the night, that the itch would eventually go away, the seemingly massive, mother-of-all bug bites would slowly fade away into my skin and that my leg would be back to normal by morning...

Times Up.

Well, it's always fun to chat with all of you ;)

Tomorrow's topics: Sideways Step and Test III

Hope to hear how you all are doing with your blogrimage's! I still need to just sit down one day and catch up with all that you guys are sharing.

Take Care!

-Eric Alan