Rhizome

Well, we finally did it. This past weekend my wife and I unlocked the gates of hell! We hooked up our TV to rabbit ears in order to receive the local, non-cable channels. Ever since last spring when we moved into out current place, we had not done this. In our last apartment we had free cable, and when we moved we never got around to hooking the damn thing up again. Instead, we watched lots of movies on DVD's. But this past weekend my wife talked me into hooking it up again. She said she just wanted to watch PBS. Unfortunately neither of us has that kind of self-control. Is the dam's floodgates thrown wide? Hopefully I've gotten over my addiction. Time will tell.

The local Taco Time restaurant down the street from us has a burnt out c on their neon sign thus creating a new place: Tao Time. I want to go! Cool!

The song of the week, which is really a holdover from last week, in honor of the Senate confirmation hearings on Judge Alito to become a Supreme Court Justice is John Lennon's "Gimme Some Truth." Although written 35 years ago, it could still well apply to today's political scene:

I'm sick and tired of hearing things from uptight short-sighted narrow-minded hypocritics
All i want is the truth
Just gimme some truth

I've had enough of reading things by nuerotic pyschotic pig-headed politicians
All i want is the truth
Just gimme some truth

No short haired yellow-bellied son of tricky dicky is gonna mother hubbard soft soap me
With just a pocketful of hope
Money for dope
Money for rope

I'm sick to death of seeing things from tight-lipped condescending mommies little chauvinists
All i want is the truth
Just gimme some truth

I've had enough of watching scenes of schizophrenic egocentric paranoic prima donnas
All i want is the truth
Just gimme some truth

'Nuf said? I'm just so worried about the future of the country if this guy gets on the Court. He cares more about corporations and cementing government's power grab against the interests of the people. I just wish people would wake up and get a clue. He's going to be in there for another 35 years subverting the will of the people and there's not much we can really do about it. Orrin Hatch is right about one thing: elections have consequences. When are people going to stop voting against their own best interests? Maybe this is an argument for limited terms on the Court. Isn't ten-fifteen years long enough for someone like Antonin Scalia to be screwing up the country (and to guarantee the continued independence of the country's Judiaciary)?

In the textbook I use for the college composition class I teach, The Bedford Reader (9th ed.), many of the reading selections are followed by short pieces about writing written by the authors themsevles. Many of them offer good advice and useful insights into their writing process.

One in particular I find to be a bit of an inspiration. It's by a guy named William Lutz. He has two good pieces of advice. The first is what he called his rule about writing in an interview with C-SPAN's Brian Lamb: "you never write a book, you write three pages, or you write five pages" (425). The trick is to write a short, limited number of pages each day. The second good piece of advice is to "never pump the well dry" (426), meaning that one should never stop writing when one is out of ideas. Always stop when you have something more to write about. Then you write a short note to yourself about what to write the next day. The next day, you rewrite what you wrote the day before, thus getting yourself primed for that day's work.

This seems like excellent advice, and one that I will try to remember to take to heart as I try to jump start my writing again.