Reflections from Maine

On the Road:

Though more temperate along the coast, Maine is still a true northern land. The fogs roll heavily over sparse, hilly, granite plots from which farmers manage to extract what little bounty; instead, the sea is where the sustenance lies - it's life giving itself so that we may live alongside.
Life here moves slowly, matching the lazy lapping of the bayed in North Atlantic; here people know that the tides cannot be controlled, that the lobster will come to the box when it's hungry, and that the wind will take to the sail in due course. My only urgency came in the damp of dusk when the wind began to suck the warmth from the very depths of my marrow. But on a sunny August day when the mist is dried and all that permeates the air is the salty surf - there seems no more pleasant place on earth.

There is not the oppressive heat of the city: it's brick and concrete furnace fed by the cars and trains and bodies... the endless towers of glass magnifying the sun, burning us like ants under a menacing child's magnifying glass. here we do not suffocate in the underground highway - pressed against each other - pit to nose to mouth, drenched in our own and eachother's sweat.

WE shout of freedom and the air that doesn't choke, and every so often we break free and immerse ourselves in Green. But, it is not to last - like heroin fading from our veins, we begin to chaffe under the lack of ever-present stimulus. Blogs, TV, Google, Lights, texting and tweeting... and the all you can eat of media vomit, and the isle after isle of choice - no need to adapt and adjust, if there is a "need", it is filled. We need the movie, the club, the show, the clothes, the recognition, shameless flaunting of our emptiness. Because when we find ourselves too long in nature we become faced with ourselves - without the anaesthesia of constant bombardment of how we should think, what we should feel, what we should buy, who is our enemy, and how we can project instead of BE - we shut down and curl up in the corner.
We are scary upon first encounter. We discover our emptiness and depravity, the hidden truth that on average we have naught to offer ourselves, let alone some one else.
So we flee the Green and the clean and the pure, and re-immerse in the muck of falsehood.
"Act as if..." has become all we are; we show what we are not because we have ceased to struggle to make ourselves real.


On the Book:

I am starting to lean more and more toward short stories. I think I can capture the different generations and the diversity of experience more poignantly if I separate them, yet keep the theme and ideas. There is no need to tie lives that are truly disparate, no need to remove their message by blending it with others. If I can set forth the premise and introduce the stories and the theme, I can then treat them like the unique blooms they truly are.