Creative Juicers...

That phrase "Get the creative juices flowing" made me think of just how those juices would start flowing... And the unsavory thought struck me, "Hmmm, probably the same way we get juice from other things... by wrenching and squeezing the dang thing till we've purged it of it's last 'gettable' drop."

Sitting down to write is the precise time one would like to have those creative liquids seeping copiously and -- very often -- that's just when the mental electricity goes out and the infernal machine won't operate and the juices, alas, remain unsquozed. (it's a word, 'cause I said it is.) Of course...that's when you knuckle down and do it like Grandma did before household electricity was a given. You grab that fruit and you slice it open, and you mash it down on that weird thing that looks like a deformed, ridgy boob, and Voila! You got your juice!

Come to think of it... that pretty much nutshells the writing process in all it gory glory.

Before I put my big girl panties on and actually told people that I was a writer, and swallowed my fear and joined a Writer's group, I wrote with abandon... I wrote like it was my job. I wrote without even thinking about it. As soon as I told someone, "Why yes, I am a Writer," it appeared the well pretty much ran dry.

It reminds me of a story about faith I came across once. Here it is:

The following letter was found in a baking-powder can wired to the handle of an old pump that offered the only hope of drinking water on a very long and seldom-used trail across Nevada’s Amargosa Desert:

“This pump is all right as of June 1932. I put a new sucker washer into it and it ought to last five years. But the washer dries out and the pump has got to be primed. Under the white rock I buried a bottle of water, out of the sun and cork end up. There’s enough water in it to prime the pump, but not if you drink some first. Pour about one-fourth and let her soak to wet the leather. Then pour in the rest medium fast and pump like crazy. You’ll git water. The well has never run dry. Have faith. When you git watered up, fill the bottle and put it back like you found it for the next feller.
(signed) Desert Pete.
P.S. Don’t go drinking the water first. Prime the pump with it and you’ll git all you can hold

(Keith Miller and Bruce Larson, The Edge of Adventure)

That little buried bottle is to the pump what 'creative juicers' are to writing... My friend Diane calls them 'prompts'.

During one of our meetings, someone -- in the LIBRARY, no less (tell me, when did libraries lose that 'shhhh, please be quiet' thing? Why was I never told?) -- starts blabbing rather loudly on her cell phone during one of our 10 minute writing exercises. In the library. Where it's supposed to be a safe haven for studying. I got rather irate, "OH! the nerve --" when Diane shhsh'd me and said, "Use it: it's a prompt!" Aside from giving me a "harrunh?" moment... I actually learned something.

Everything -- every piece of stimuli our senses take in -- can be used as flint to start the fire; the creative juicer that extracts those creative juices. Every experience we have, every person we know is an opportunity to exercise that squeezing hand and extract a little prose.

Bernie Mac, Isaac Hayes, and...?

My husband has a good friend, also an alumnus from the acting pool at Disney's Epcot, with whom he shares a limited but spirited email correspondence. The subjects of these emails usually include a 'what I'm up to now' catch-up, a list of some haunted places the friend has researched and the 'Celebrity Triumvirate Deaths' that seem to happen with more regularity the older I get. (or maybe it's just that all my childhood celebs and heros are aging with me...?)

First, Bernie Mac passed on Saturday from complications of pneumonia and left me and I'm sure many of his other fans completely stunned. He was so ...young.

Then tonight, I sit down to the laptop and see that Isaac Hayes was pronounced today at 2:08 pm.

I read Bernie Mac's bio yesterday, and mourned a little. (I can't truly mourn, as I didn't know the man personally. But I always appreciated his 'observation on life' comedy style...and his appreciation for our Libraries. My heart goes out to his family, nonetheless. Read on, Bernie Mac man. Read on.)

It wasn't until tonight, as I was reading some bios and articles about Isaac Hayes that I started getting a little freaked out. In one of the articles, the reporter commented that Mr. Hayes had recently completed a role in a film called Soul Men (scheduled for release in November) with Samuel L. Jackson and... "comedian Bernie Mac who died on Saturday..."

Whoa. Look... I'm kind of -- in spite of my usually no-nonsense, practical faith, and due in large part to a complex mixture of Southern Baptist religion and deeply-entrenched southern spiritualism -- superstitious. A black cat crosses in front of my car? I pull a u-turn. I know it's crazy, but man, it's deep-seated!

My only thought on reading the Soul Men cast list is... Samuel L...Watch your BACK! It's completely irrational, but I'm actually worried about the man! Too many motherf*&%ing deaths in the motherf*&%ing news!

TWO cast members passed away in one weekend. What went on on that set? Was it under a curse? Remember when the little girl from Poltergeist died in that heli- accident? There were rumblings of a 'cursed' set over that incident...

I'm confronted with death in my little, aging small town all the time; I accept it as a natural course of life. But celebrity deaths? They freak me out. They seem so sudden. And they truly seem to happen in threes.

And that? Is just spooky.