I admit it. I'm a bad, bad blogger. It goes with the territory of having taught journal writing for three decades: Write fast, don't censor, hell, don't even think, just write, write your heart out, go ahead, don't write for your professor, don't write for your inncer critic.....well, it's not a popular approach to sensibility or rationality. And especially not when writing about which race of people were interred on Bainbridge Island during the Second World War.
"People," to coin a verbal tactic from Steven Colbert, "I know it wasn't the Koreans. I always KNEW it wasn't the Koreans. I was just testing YOU to make sure YOU knew it wasn't the Koreans."
I mean, I read Snow falling on Cedars along with everybody else. Also, I had two uncles who lost legs at Pearl Harbor and a father who fought in New Guinea. And my former blog statements still stand about coming here in the late fifties to work in the strawberry fields. Forever.
So I know. I knew. I always have known.
Incidentally, the best story I know about Pearl Harbor occurred when my dear deceased husband, Jim, was around ten years old and staying with his grandparents on a farm in Eastern Washington (his parents lived in E. Washintgon as well, but on this day he happend to be on his grandparents' farm), and they owned a horse named Jap. Jap was a large horse which Jim rode frequently and had ultimate faith in, in terms of being a horse big enough and calm enough to not buck Jim off or in any way behave overzealously or otherwise erractically.
So it was quite a shock to young Jim when he thought the words his frantic looking Grandmother was shouting, as she shook her white apron in the direction of the chickens and the hens to make them hasten and scoot, were, "Jap has bombed Pearl Harbor! Jap has bombed Pearl Harbor!"
Of course, what his Grandma said was, (Oh and pardon me, all you politically-correct-people-who-want-to-bring-the-past-into-the-present-and-make-it-nicer) - - ' "THE Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor!" but, to his ten year old years, that isn't what he heard. Ears are like that. They hear what's most familiar. If it isn't familiar, ears will bend sounds to make the sounds familiar. P.S. Just the same as eyes do.
But I'm doing it again; getting "off-point". However. I am afraid my last blog went off on SO many paths and was.......okay, so thoughtlessly erroneous.....in at least one major way......that I am certain I managed to convince several of my acquaintances (but none of my friends, I hope, since all my friends of at least, say, forty years, realize I am likely to write anything at any time and be absolutly all over the board, this end up or that end down, right or wrong, stark raving mad or just stark raving) - - - in such a way that I can sound Wise and Knowing or Dumb and Dumber.
Either way. That's me.
Oh, but I'm so GLAD I'm so glad I'm not Mitt Romney and don't have to stand in front of a bunch of cameras and grin a big shit-eating grin and shrug my shoulders and throw out my hands and say, "Oops!"
Because, see, I am someone who DOES believe, I mean I really really do, believe that words matter. I also believe that "knowing-stuff" matters. Although, like most people, I believe that the stuff I know is more important than the stuff YOU know.
But enough of this, since I can see that I am just getting myself in trouble all over again. So I'll just say this: I can see that I need to take care to organize my brain before I start pouring my so-called thoughts out onto the blank page. Because my life's sound track, when cranked up as loudly as I want, is way too full of Al Green and Alison Krauss and Leonard Cohen and Marianne Faithfull and Ray Charles and Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys and-all-at-the-same-time - - - for me to make much sense when I am whacking away at my keyboard, just enjoying my Self in a passionate writing sort of way, just scribbling in type, the way I do in my own journal...to make much sense to anyone..
I need to censor myself. Clearly. I need to edit myself. Clearly. I need to do like I do when I send something OUT to be considered to be published. Because, for me, the two - - blogging and composing for what I call "Real Publication" - - are two entirely different things.
I'll end with something Jim said to me years and years ago when I was having trouble with writing dialogue between characters in a story. He said the following: "When your dialogue flows as if you are tripping over chairs, stop writing."
I think that's about as good as it gets in the field of advice about writing.
Goodnight, People.
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