It’s not all ferrets and leprosy at Casa De Cushing.
There are days where things are considerably calmer. Right now we’re engaged in finishing out some remodeling projects and doing some fall cleaning.
It’s a modest abode — but it’s home. And things are considerably calmer in the neighborhood since Ma Kettle got quarantined. I pray to Jesus to remove this hardness of heart I have toward her — it’s a terrible thing to wish leprosy on your neighbor. Hardly “loving your neighbor” at all. *sigh*
I just finished (a few weeks ago) a novella-length project, and I’m taking a wee bit of a break from writing — at least through the end of the week.
I mean, I have written, but it’s just goofy little mouse-turd-sort-of-scribbling. For example: I have wasted devoted some time writing Bizarro haiku for Every Tree Has a Face. Sometimes I entertain morbid thoughts, like what would happen to me if I died prematurely. What would my literary legacy be? Surely, if I were to die in some car accident or something at this point, I would be memorialized as Mistress of the Bizarro Haiku. Then maybe they’d set up the Cushing Memorial Bizarro Haiku award, and I’d be given a place in the Haiku Hall of Fame in Nagasaki, Japan (yah, everyone knows about the atomic blast there at the end of World War II, but that notoriety eclipses the fact that the Haiku Hall of Fame is there, too). It’s pretty bad for any art form when no one really knows where its Hall of Fame is.
I hate that haikus have to lurk in the a-bomb’s shadow.
Anyway, I certainly hope I don’t die an untimely death. No offense to haiku, but I want a literary legacy a bit more meaningful than “Mistress of the Bizarro Haiku”. I mean, the heyday of the American haiku was at least one hundred years ago. I’d wager that the majority of the American populace doesn’t even have the vaguest sense of what a haiku is.
That’s not the best way to build a career.
I wish I could swear off haiku, the way some people swear off hard drugs. But I can’t — they’re addicting. If you’re a writer and you’ve been tempted to engage in haiku — please don’t. It only leads to a world of heartbreak, a world where you spend hours stringing together 17 syllables into little mouse-turd-size poems for people to wake up in the morning and discover (to their disgust) on websites like Every Tree Has a Face.
Don’t. Do. It.
