How to Build a Better (Squirrel!!) Trap

three children looking at a tablet computer

Fall semester has once again begun, and I’m still slogging along –no longer stuck, but moving– on my latest batch of as-yet unjoined essay rambles. And, once again, as sure as the cicadas that start up in July, begins the lament from my students in their first-of-the semester self-assessment papers:

“I used to read all the time, but I got too busy with [sports, extracurriculars, homework, …fill in the blank].”

“I used to write short stories when I was younger. I don’t know why I quit.”

And then comes the sentence that is most telling to me, perhaps answering the questions posed above as to why the change in reading and writing habits: “I guess it all happened when I got a [smartphone or laptop or gaming system].” Few are the students who say it out loud, but I think most of them –and most of us who are out of school– could say similar things.

I’d been meaning to for the last three semesters, but this time, I finally did it. I sent out an email opening up a conversation about why we’re all so prone to distraction and its evil sibling, procrastination. I’m curious to hear, in light of the recent pushback by some members of Gen Z against smartphones, just why they think this is. I don’t think many (any) of my students are in line to trade in their iPhones for flip phones, but I hear an increasing amount of commentary by my students’ generation about the ways that they feel a constant stream (scream?) of notifications is affecting not only their free time, but their mental health.

Toward the end of the email, I painted my students a picture, via statistics:

In 2007, the first iPhone was introduced. If they’re 18 today, they’d have been 2 years old.

In 2009, the Droid came out. They’d have been 4.

In 2010, the iPad was released. They’d have been 5.

I’m 50 years old as I write this. I didn’t own a smartphone until I was 38, and only bought an iPad in 2020 to help with online pandemic teaching.

These are the kids who grew up perhaps handed their parents’ iPad to keep them company during a long road trip. They might have been watching cartoons on their mom’s phone while riding in the cart at the grocery store. They’ve likely not known a world where the only options while waiting in line (or waiting for class to start) are striking up a conversation with the person next to them or just quietly watching the world.

Would Spaceman Spiff (Calvin and Hobbes fans will understand) have existed if Calvin had been given an iPhone? Maybe not. Have our phones stolen from us the art of daydreaming? Maybe so.

There’s a creativity to daydreaming –that other relative of distraction and procrastination– that doesn’t exist in the kind of distraction and procrastination that comes from a screen. Some of us creative weirdos would even say that daydreaming –mental margin, empty time and space to dream– is essential for our creative process. I’m one of those who would claim that. When I lost my two-hour commute to campus, I lost my prime time for mental margin: driving. I’ve since been able to replace that with a superior substitute (walking), but I hadn’t realized what I’d lost until I spent a summer sunk deep into the internet with the worst case of creative block I’d ever experienced. I point the finger of blame solidly at my tendency to scroll rather than type. I’d traded creativity for consumption, and the result was that at the end of the summer, I was exhausted and bored for no reason with nothing written to show for all my hours in the computer chair.

Since that revelation, I’ve tried to be more intentional about leaving some mental margin. I switch off my computer entirely on Saturday night before I go to bed. If I need the internet, I’ll use my iPad, but I take it off the charger. Once the charge is gone, I’m done. On Sundays I generally try (and often fail) to stick to analog: books. Notebooks. Pen and paper. I’ve very, very rarely had email on my phone (only when necessary, when I’m away from my computer and anticipate students who have trouble with an assignment), so this also means I don’t check my email on Sundays. I’ve already alerted my students (those who’ve read the syllabus, that is) that I’m offline on Sundays, so they’re aware. I will still open my email Monday morning to find a couple new emails, but I’ve not yet had a crisis over a Sunday due to abandoning my inbox for a day.

Has it helped? I believe so. Even just having that one day “off” my normal routine of morning writing and grading and taking breaks to scroll news sites or YouTube (I’m still off social media, except for a rare trip into Instagram now and then) has helped as a once-a-week reset.

Reset is an important concept. Reset, and the idea of mental margin. Some seek it by meditation, but I think there are even more possibilities for gaining that sense of openness and quiet in the mind. Prayer, for one. I spent a lot of my time up and down Highway 75 between Luverne and Sioux Center praying in an informal kind of way, just letting my thoughts go in the direction of a conversation with God. Sound weird? Maybe to some, but it’s the primary way I connect with God and find peace in the middle of things I don’t understand or don’t think I can handle. And that kind of prayer happens easily for me when there’s mental margin. It dies out when I’m surrounded by distractions. Prayer’s never been something I’ve struggled with, and I think that’s largely due to the fact that I treasure that mental margin. I notice a lack of peace, a rise of anxiety when it’s disrupted –although sometimes it takes me a whole summer to realize it.

So maybe that’s the center of all of this: mental margin. Learning to daydream again. Turning off the notifications and walking (literally) away from the screens every so often –or regularly. Here’s hoping that a conversation with my class brings about a renewed pursuit of focus –not just by trading in our iPhones for a flip phone or a weekly digital Sabbath, but learning to let ourselves rest as we go, to reclaim those before-class or in-the-hall moments by reconnecting with each other.

Oh, and my latest EDC (everyday carry) includes a flip phone. My daughter has said she gives it 3 months. (Her, in the car, trying to respond to a text while I’m driving: “This thing sucks!!” Me, quietly with an eyeroll: “Yes, that’s the point!”) I’m keeping my deactivated iPhone to use as an iPod (no Spotify on the flip phone), but it’s staying home for the most part. And no, I don’t see this as a short-term experiment. Where do I sign up for the grownup chapter of the Luddite Club?

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evening pages: an experiment

Evening Sky” by Mary/ CC0 1.0

Signing in quickly, even if just to blow off the dust and get reacquainted with things around here.

Anyway…

I’ve been doing a practice called “Morning Pages” more on than off for the last two or three years. Morning pages? What are morning pages, you ask? It’s three pages of longhand ramble, written as closely to the first thing in the morning as possible. For me, “first thing in the morning” means after coffee, before grading. It’s meant to be pen-and-paper, but I’ve been using my ReMarkable (my e-ink tablet that I’ll probably write more about in days to come because it’s been a game-changer for me) a lot of mornings. What I use depends on my mood. All you really need is a pen and paper, though. No matter what the medium, it’s handwritten, not typed. Pacing is important, and the experience of handwriting is completely different than composing at the computer keyboard. I’m convinced that I think differently when I write by hand.

It’s not quite formal journaling. Some mornings produce more “useful” writing than others. Some are pure whiney ramble, some are a chronicle of circling thoughts, some are actually working through a problem. I just show up to the page, and I never know quite what I’m going to get. It’s not usually as good as a box of chocolates, but it keeps me writing and it gets me off zero, which for the last two-year patch of being creatively stuck, is saying something. Julia Cameron is the person who came up with and popularized (formalized) the idea. She’s a little further left on the Oprah to Spock continuum than I generally prefer, but she’s given the world a lot of good advice when it comes to how to get unstuck. Here’s her introduction to the idea.

So with that lengthy explanation, I had a thought last night that maybe I’ll try something new, either in addition to (or instead of some days) my Morning Pages practice. Evening pages, I’m calling it, because I’m original like that. I’m sitting down at the end side of the day to trace back and make a record of the best moments of the day. Just a paragraph. A few sentences. A snapshot. A sort of a twist on a gratitude journal, I suppose (see, not original…). After noticing last summer’s days running together into a blur, I want to prevent that from happening to another season of my life.

So, evening pages. We’ll see if it sticks. I’ve found the secret to journaling regularly is to distinguish “regularly” from “religiously.” I skip a day or two, but I always come back to it. No guilt, just moving on –a practice I learned when my high school diary had no pre-printed dates. I could skip a day or two and not have to leave a blank page, and that was a huge relief.

Oh, and I’ve said my final goodbye (no, really, this is it, I mean it this time) to my account at The Social Media Outlet Formerly Known as Twitter. Finally got sick of being a pawn for some rich dude’s social experiment (can we all just admit that it’s painfully obvious that he’s doing everything he can to end it?). The time spent scrolling and spinning wheels and wasting words wasn’t worth it any more. So, save for my seldom-used Instagram account, I’m social-media free, and that might have something to do with my productivity this morning, despite my not being in the mood to grade. And it might have something to do with my return here. Again, I’m hoping the habit sticks.

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Kicking at the Darkness

Sunrise from the International Space Station

Starting a new thing this morning: I’m calling it Audiobiography Song Cycle. Every so often, I’ll pull a song out of my Spotify “Audiobiography” playlist, start there and run with the ideas. Here’s the first installment.

One of my favorite assignments as a prof is one I’ve called “Song Memory.” I have my students think of a song that they can’t hear without it bringing up a strong memory, and write about it –both the memory itself and how the song connects. John Warner, in his book The Writer’s Practice, which I now use as a text for my online writing course, has a version of this assignment that’s more focused on learning to write with sensory detail. At any rate, I’ve played with this idea of a sort of musical ekphrasis for a while, so here goes.

The first time I’d heard of Bruce Cockburn was in our time in California. Sam’s principal was a huge Bruce Cockburn fan and, bringing his guitar out once while we were visiting his family, introduced us to some of his music. I don’t remember it making much of a lasting impact on me at the time. But in my early blogging days, I followed a writer who quoted a Bruce Cockburn song in a post, and that image of “kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight” resonated. It’s such a clear image of the struggle we, particularly people who write, go through to reveal meaning in the stories we share.

When I returned to school in my early 40’s, figuring out not just how to use this gift I’d kicked around for years as a means to untangle my days but also figuring out the why of it all, why it was worth putting some of this stuff I’d been untangling, that lyric came back to me, at the end of an essay. I started with Sylvia Plath and ended up with Bruce Cockburn.

Most first drafts of my essays take a wild, strange journey from A to B. It’s one reason why revision, for me, isn’t ever an option. It’s a requirement, if I have any hope of a reader following the rabbit trails that go from my brain to the paper (or screen). I quite often start with a flash of an idea –a song, in this case, this morning– and usually don’t wind up figuring out the “what it’s about” until about page two or three.

With the essay I mentioned, I started with some of my original memories of college, back “when I was supposed to be there,” and wound through some of my experiences in returning to the place I’d abandoned two years in (I’d dropped out after my sophomore year), some of the memories that came back and how I interpreted them differently, having aged 25 years and gained some wisdom. The story of a non-traditional student mom probably isn’t all that unique, but since I’d returned to the same college where I started, I figured it was worth exploring some of the things I’d learned in the process of tying together a quarter-century gap in my educational adventure.

From there, my Page Two Revelation was that this was really about examining the work of writing. Figuring out why this long-practiced, newly-taken-seriously vocation of mine was worth so much time, risk, and finances to pursue in closing that 25-year gap. Why I’d returned in the first place to finish my degree. As a reader, I’d already discovered that one of the best reasons why stories are so important is that they make us feel less alone in the world. Much of why I wanted to write, and to share that writing in the world, was to take that chance to say “Have you ever felt this? Experienced this? Survived this? Here, I’ll go first…” in my writing. That “I’ll go first” was a huge reason I took the leap into putting my writing out into the world in the form of a blog in an obscure corner of the internet back in 2006 when I started. But in this particular essay, I was wandering back into some of the larger reasons I’d left college in the first place, reasons I hadn’t wanted to deal with. Reasons that had to do with failed dreams and failed hopes of relationships that never materialized. And that’s why I started with Plath.

Somewhere in my sophomore year on a grey, sad day, I’d wandered into the college library, over to the poetry section, and pulled Plath off the shelf. I flipped through the pages and found “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” which met me right where I was at the time. Not all of it, to be clear, but particularly that line, “(I think I made you up inside my head).” I’d just abandoned the education half of my major, and wasn’t entirely sure where my life or my education was going. Every decision I made in that week and those that followed seemed so real, so urgent, so life-shattering, …and yet, all of it was in my head. That memory was the thing that sparked the essay, when I realized that the very place where I’d stumbled up on that book as a disillusioned former education major was the exact place where my poetry class met, a quarter-century later. Writing it was an attempt to explore just one of the occasional discoveries I had, stringing together that 25-year gap.

As I kept writing, in the essay I left the college library and traveled into that quarter-century liminal space, empathizing with Plath’s feelings of shock and disorientation at finding herself a mother in “Morning Song.” Looking at “Lady Lazarus,” I leaned her experience of burning her writing against my own recent shredding of my old diaries and journals. For Plath, the burning was an act of destruction, but for me, shredding my old writing was a way of freeing myself to start something new. I found that in the ensuing 25 years after I put Plath back on the shelf, I no longer identified with her as much as I contrasted her experiences against my own.

But the essay wasn’t quite complete. I did then what I typically do, letting it rest for a few days, returning later to hear that line from Cockburn’s song again in my head, and it wound up the whole journey perfectly.

Writing is my act of kicking against the darkness, waiting for the daylight to spread. That was why all this work and risk and time and struggle was worth it. Worth it for the act of putting my words out there as an invitation to no longer be alone, Worth it for the fact that all this stuff in my head needed a place to go, Worth it because I realized what seemed to be almost too late that this was the thing I was meant to do all along –I’d just missed all the signs. And in that wander from Plath to Cockburn, I think I started to see the daylight bleeding through.

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I Should Really Be Reading…

So I’ve realized that my on-again, off-again Twitter account has encouraged a burgeoning possibly bad habit: piling up books in my TBR (To Be Read) pile while also consuming far too much of my free time.

And because it’s Thursday, and I need to start making this blog a habit, I thought I’d mention how crazy it is that collectively, so many of us (myself included, despite my attempts to fight it) have traded our long-form reading habits for hours of internet scrolling and “microblogging” on Facebook and Twitter.

I think there’s something to be said for recovering whole-book reading. There’s a sense of context you get from a whole book that’s missing from short articles, blog posts, and social media. Maybe that lack of context is helping fuel our increasingly-divisive, increasingly-polarized society. Maybe. I don’t know, but I think it definitely isn’t helpful that we get so much of our information in context-free bits and pieces from people who frequently are unqualified to comment on something or just don’t know the whole story.

So, books. I just finally caved and bought Beth Moore’s memoir and I think I’ll work on that this weekend. Never mind that I have five other books —three on the Kindle (at least) and two —wait, three— books on my nightstand to finish. Whether or not I actually have ADD/ADHD, I might actually have attention-deficit-reading disorder. And so, I think I’ll abandon all those other excellent books, …and get started on something new, of course.

Signing off before one more of my literary Twitter friends mentions yet another book I can’t live without reading (thank God for my library’s Libby app, or I’d really be in trouble), and maybe —just maybe— I’ll throw in a short review of Beth Moore’s book here once I finish, just to be sure that I actually *do* finish it in less than a couple weeks. Stay tuned.

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A Long Winter’s Silence

photography of leafless tree surrounded by snow

I haven’t seen bare ground anywhere around here since December. It’s been a long, long winter. The last storm that I recall dumping this much snow was April of 2018, and then, we knew that it was likely the last snow of the season.

But when it snowed in December, then a foot or more in early January, I knew we had a long way to go yet. We had a short February thaw, a few days above freezing, enough to melt the ice dams and the gargantuan icicles that had formed on the corner of the parsonage. And now, we’re wearily awaiting the arrival of another foot dump of snow, just when the patio furniture was beginning to emerge from the drift it’s been encased in since New Year’s week.

We attempted a trip to Dell Rapids this morning for my physical therapy appointment to fix my frozen shoulder and abandoned just short of half-way. The first round of snow had already arrived, and visibility was deteriorating. But on the way back from the van, there it was: the clean hush of new-fallen snow. One of my favorite things about first-snows back when I was a child. That, and the way the sky glowed at night, once everything was covered. Out here, the glow isn’t as evident, since we’re no longer in a town, but the silence is still there, perhaps even more intensely.

The silence was a reminder to me that even in the middle of a long, weary winter, there’s still beauty to be found. And it was a reminder to me that the long silence I’ve experienced in my writing life just might have some beauty and wonder behind it as well.

I’m currently in a season of silence, surrender, and listening. Not much else to do, really. I start something, and it circles, wanders, goes back into something I’ve written already about a dozen times. And that’s where I generally quit. It all gets sucked back into the same rut, it seems, with no new epiphanies. So, I’ve held on to that idea of silence all afternoon.

My typical antidote for writer’s block is just doing the next thing, starting somewhere random and running with it, but unfortunately that’s led to about six months of wandering, circling, treading water. Maybe I haven’t been paying enough attention, I’ve thought. Maybe I need more margin in my day. Maybe I need to read more. Yet none of this has really helped me regain momentum. So, today, I’m going to focus on what’s right in front of me: silence. And maybe that’s just what I need, because it’s what I seem to have been delivered in spades.

Today, I’ll write about the silence, I thought. So, here I am. A foot and a half deep in the white, clean hush of winter quiet, listening for what comes through, trying to be patient.

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Snow Day, Jan. 3 2023

Haven’t been out with a yard stick, but I’m guessing we have about a foot of snow outside this morning. Well before the bulk of the present storm hit, there was about 5 inches of new snow as a prelude, so …well over a foot most likely.

Our little battery-powered snowblower will be completely inadequate against this newest deposit, so it’s either shovels or hope that we can find someone with a snowblower and an above-average sense of compassion. The parsonage isn’t a corner lot like our previous home, at least, so all we need to clear (“all”?) is the front sidewalk and the driveway. Still, that’ll be enough work with drifts knee- to waist-deep. My great-grandpa died of a heart attack clearing snow, so this much already has me anxious, until I remember that there are five of us home now, one of whom is my 17-year-old son who, frankly, could use some physical exertion. We’ll get it cleared.

The fancy new LED display sign on the Methodist Church across the road says it’s 19 degrees, but Sam, coming in after refilling the bird feeders and checking to be sure the furnace exhaust vent was clear (that last task was at my request), says it feels much colder with the wind —silence or not.

One strange thing I noticed, peeking my head out the front door this morning: the quiet. It’s still snow-quiet, despite the wind. It’s windy enough that the view outside my living room window is a field of white, save for the withering ash tree in the front yard and the pale yellow outline of the school buses across the street. When it’s a white-out in town, you know it’ll be that much worse out of town just a few miles, with nothing to break the wind or the landscape. It’s windy, but there’s still that silence that comes from a thick blanket of snow.

The kids are still asleep, or at least in their rooms yet. I’m not quite to my second cup of coffee, and I have two courses to finish preparing this morning. They’re both ahead of plan, though, so I might get a few days clear for writing once they’re polished up and ready to go. Syllabi were finished before New Year’s, so it’s just the fiddly details that need arranging and fixing on the website now. With online courses, most of the work is done before the course starts, then it’s mainly grading —and for the literature class, orchestrating a few Zoom discussions. This will be the first semester I’ve taught two different courses at the same time, so this’ll be a fun adventure.

Bird count this morning: the usual neighborhood nuthatches and juncos, and we finally caught a picture of our resident downy woodpecker, Robert (Robert Downy Woodpecker), at the window feeder.

We’ll see if they get enough of this cleared for school to start on time tomorrow for Corwin. For now, I’m just grateful we’ve nowhere to go today, and we’re all home and safe.

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Returning to Longform: A Morning Update

November first, and the high is supposed to hit near 70 degrees. The photo was from a little less than a month ago, one of the first mornings of frost on the ground. Leaves haven’t been very colorful in town. Seeing as the trees around here survived the 100 mph winds of a derecho in May and more severe weather than we’ve had for quite a while, I suppose it’s understandable that they’d be tired out after a long, difficult summer —perhaps it’s too much to expend the energy on dressing before death this year. The front yard trees are bare already, the side yard trees are hanging on to about half their leaves, dangling from the branches and dried out, a dull brown to pale yellow-green.

Next week, the clocks will be back to standard time —no more waiting in the dark for the bus or driving home at 5:30 pm with the glaring Western sun in people’s eyes. Now, I suppose, we wait for snow and winter to come. It’s been a strange summer, not only because of the weather patterns, but also because of getting used to a new home, a new town. I should walk more. Maybe with the unseasonable warmth this week, I’ll manage to make that happen.

And it’s the first day of NaNoWriMo —National Novel Writing Month. I’m not writing a novel, but I’m finally getting started in earnest on my next writing project. Apparently they allow us non-novelists to join in now (don’t let me catch you calling a nonfiction book a novel), so I’m taking advantage of the accountability. We’ll see how close to 50,000 words of ”sh*tty first drafts” (as Anne Lamott would say) I can get down in a month. I’m taking a hiatus from Twitter, starting yesterday, so that should help as well to get me writing more in long form and less in short bursts.

At any rate, happy November, and happy day one of NaNoWriMo to those who celebrate, as they say. Here’s to a month of writing and walking and settling in for whatever winter will bring.

Time to go get some coffee and start this day for real.

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In the Morning Mail

white and black cow head

One of the mixed blessings of having moved to Colton, South Dakota (population about 700 or so) has been that mail delivery in town …isn’t actually a thing. Mail is delivered promptly by 9:30am, Monday through Saturday not to a box on our front step, but to a box in the town post office, about a ten-minute walk away, if you’re going at a leisurely pace. Sam and I normally trade off going to get the mail, but since I returned from our latest mother-son road trip to Wyoming, I’ve been stuck on Mountain time and I’m still in wake-up mode. Not proud of that confession, but there it is.

So, one of us –lately Sam– heads off at 9:30 to the post office. It’s been hot here the last few days, but not too bad at that time of day. We had about a weeklong reprieve of pristine June weather –crystal clear blue skies and 70 to 75 degrees, the kind that makes the grass grow enough to need a weekly mow. But now, we’ve returned to humidity and 90’s since Wednesday. The kind of late June / early July weather that makes the corn grow, or so I’m told.

This morning’s sole piece of mail was a postcard advertisement for a farm open house. Not exactly a novelty around here, I thought as I turned it over. Most of our congregation by a large margin are farm families. For most of them to “See Baby Calves – Watch the Milking” as the postcard suggests would be what my mom would call a “busman’s holiday.” Or maybe something like when my dad came along with my mom (who got her driver license at thirty-something) to the grocery store. If he came in with us, it was usually to do sales research. He worked for a place that printed a lot of food packaging labels, so a trip to the grocery store meant the possibility of finding a new local customer. I could imagine some of the local farm neighbors dropping in to see what new equipment or technology this “modern dairy farm focused on sustainability” has –or doesn’t have. Size up the competition, possibly? Do farmers do that sort of thing? I haven’t been here long enough to know.

At any rate, it struck me as an odd thing, getting a farm open house invitation out here. Not sure how far and wide into Sioux Falls these invitations flew, but if I were to go, I’d be most interested in their claim to “capture Renewable Natural Gas from cow manure.” Farmers:1, Vegans: 0 on that scale, I guess. I am encouraged that this local farm is reaching out to the ordinary public, probably the sort that couldn’t explain how the meat that comes in plastic packaging gets in there, or whose kids might think milk comes from a plastic jug or a paper carton instead of from the underside of a cow (ew!). Yes, those kinds of people live in South Dakota, too. They’re just harder to find. And more education can’t be a bad thing in that case. Especially when it comes with free ice cream.

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A Rather Cynical Look at “Writer’s Block”

silver macbook on white table

Does anyone actually still read books in 2022? Forget books –does anyone even still read blogs in 2022?

Going even further, does anyone read anything longer than a web page in 2022? Maybe that’s the more appropriate question. I started reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows a few weeks ago (spoiler alert/confession: I scanned the final four chapters because I lost interest), and since then I’ve been questioning how much and how permanently not just society’s reading habits have changed, but my own have as well.

Sure, most of us spend multiple hours behind a glowing screen or carry one around with us all day, but does that kind of reading even count? One of Carr’s main arguments is that the convenience and pervasiveness of the internet has harmed our ability to focus on longer, more complex reading tasks. Instead of sitting at the breakfast table behind a newspaper (which is really, I suppose, another type of scan-reading), or instead of reading a book in the recliner on Saturday afternoon or in the evening after supper, we get our hits of information from short bursts of reading. Snatches of ideas. Little snacks of information rather than balanced meals of knowledge that come with reading whole books or reading multiple pieces on a given subject. In addition to losing our collective attention span, what we’ve lost –and what I see as the biggest danger– is context.

And just as deep reading in context is lost, what I see from my own personal internet habits since I’ve returned home for work is the ability to write well. I’ve seemed to forget how writing is HARD. Well, good writing is hard. First-draft blogs like this one are less hard, but even now, I’m realizing that while I started out with a germ of an idea, it’d have been far better to have built even a sketch of an outline. What do I want to say? What’s the point, anyway? I’m not sure I could’ve answered when I typed the tentative title.

I’ve abandoned Facebook for about two years now, but I’ve kept an on-again, off-again Twitter account, and that also is an entirely different sort of first-draft writing. I don’t really feel the need a plan to compose 280 characters or less on what I did last weekend or to blurt out a reaction to the latest outrage trigger. –Of course, I try to avoid the latter. A growing annoyance with contextless outrage posting was the main reason for abandoning Facebook and the reason I have an arms-length, skeptical relationship with my Twitter account. How much can you really change the world for the better with a 280 character post, anyway? I suppose it’s been done, but I struggle to find an example.

While I’ve heard many writers (especially in the early days of Twitter) claim that the 280 character limit is a helpful constraint and good practice at building maximal meaning in a minimum of words, what it’s done for me is far more insidious. I find that after dropping several of the writing habits I kept during my undergraduate classes and my MFA (daily journaling, regular deep reading, revision), I now tend to prefer the lazy route. Most of what I’ve written since May has been half-hearted morning pages every few days when I feel like it and a couple Twitter responses or posts a day. Not surprisingly, writing a longer piece now seems insufferably difficult. I started two pieces in the last few months in the old-fashioned manner, pen and paper to try and get my groove back, and I’m finding that what I end up with is something more like a jumble of disjointed notes than a cohesive first-draft of an actual essay. Things go all over the place. I typically hit my stride (and figure out my “what’s this really about”) around page three, … and then I lose the energy and focus to continue. I leave a bulleted list of possible future paragraph points and I tell myself I’ll come back to it later. And then when I do, I’m so disgusted by my lack of coherence that I abandon what I have and follow a different path.

Some might call this writer’s block. What this ramble is telling me, however, is not that I’m blocked. I’m out of shape.

As to what’s caused that, I’m not certain that I can solely blame the internet. Sure, my habits there don’t help matters at all, but there’s something else going on, and I think the answer lies in a lack of discipline overall. I’ve reestablished the habit of a daily walk, and found I’d forgotten how much the combination of physical activity, getting outdoors, and being able to listen through the noise in my head helps me see things more clearly. I’m forcing myself as I write this to finish my idea, something I rarely do any more through my morning pages. I know that morning pages aren’t supposed to have a point, necessarily, but I’ve been so frustrated with the lack of direction that’s shown up there that I’ve nearly abandoned the practice. It’s not the morning pages, though, just like it wasn’t just the internet or even just social media. It’s a bigger problem of losing the practice of doing deep work. Of paying attention. Of remembering why I do this. Without ideas, writing is pointless, and I think therein lies my problem: good ideas come at a cost. They require focus and discipline and work to wrangle them into words that have power to change things for the good.

At the risk of unwinding my whole point here with cheesy nostalgia, here’s where I insert the clip from my childhood memories of Debbie Allen from Fame since this came to mind, and I’ll end my ramble here for today.

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The View from the Parsonage: an Update

Well, it’s been quite a week. Finally (!) figured out what all these pieces ruminating around in my brain are taking shape to be, and I am in the process of beginning my new “work-in-process” in earnest.

Moving has gone well. Other than random piles in the basement that I’m working on building into NOT random bins, we’re pretty much settled and setting in to home here. Having more space has made keeping things decluttered so much easier. The true test will be in a couple weeks, when the girls move back home with all their stuff. I’ve done everything I could to urge them to take a storage box and keep some stuff at college, and failed. So we’ll be cramming most of their worldly possessions into our van –and the car in a couple weeks.

Gradually, I’m finding landmarks again. It’s been a while since I experienced this kind of disorientation, when even a simple grocery store trip requires the aid of Google Maps, just to be sure I don’t get turned around. Living in a town of 700 with no grocery store, no hardware –only a gas station, a lumber yard, and a Dollar General– is giving me an itch to read more Wendell Berry. We’re about 30 minutes’ drive from Sioux Falls and just under 20 minutes from the nearest hardware and grocery in Dell Rapids. On the bright side, it forces me to meal plan (or be put at the mercy of the aisles of mostly shelf-stable packaged food at Dollar General) and makes it necessary to pre-plan our trips into Sioux Falls, in order to hit all the places we need in as few trips as possible.

However, a trip to the local library (basically a bookmobile branch of the Sioux Falls library with four walls, open three half-days a week) scored me a couple books of local Colton history: a Bicentennial edition from 1976 and another one from 1989, the town’s centennial year. Colton had a local high school as recently as 1966, and an elementary school that closed some time in the last 20 years. We’re directly across the street from the old school site. The building has been torn down since the 1989 book was published, and it’s now a bus garage for the new consolidated school district. The grocery store closed not due to a lack of business, I’ve been told, but the increasing difficulty of getting suppliers to come out here and deliver stock. I’m not sure what to think of that, other than that it’s depressing that we’ve become so dependent on vehicles and bedroom towns and Dollar General stores that pay minimum wage to people willing to work long hours doing three jobs at once.

And that brings me to the next challenge: helping my kids find summer jobs. There’s always the retirement home in town. Get a CNA (often available at little to no cost through an employer), and you have yourself a guaranteed job just about anywhere in the midwest. But that takes a certain kind of person who I’m not sure my kids are, exactly. Still, it’s a job I’m encouraging them to consider. Then there’s the gas station, which is fun to a point, but my breaking point with that line of work came when I realized that most of my shift was spent selling not gas and bakery and candy bars but cigarettes and lottery tickets. My “rock bottom” –other than the 13 hour shift I worked when a co-worker failed to show up– was selling four packs of Kools to an older woman who walked in dragging her oxygen tank behind her. I felt like an enabler, and it definitely reframed my sense of importance to the community in my work. But… it’s a job. Time will tell what the kids wind up doing this summer. If it’s only getting their licenses and building an Etsy shop that’ll keep going from school, I’ll consider that a win. Still, the girls need money for college, so this year, the pressure will be increased for them to find something (anything), even if it means a regular trip into Sioux Falls to work doing retail or Starbucks or something.

So, there’s the update. Hopefully the depth of my blog posts will increase as I work through getting this next project in my head out onto the pages. If you live in a little town that’s still got a grocery, here’s my encouragement to spend the extra five or ten bucks if you have it to keep it around. You’re probably spending that on gas anyway when you buy your groceries at the Walmart 20 miles down the road, so consider it a wash and do something good for your community.

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