Choice

A mysterious box decorated with gold Chinese scrollwork with an ornate clasp sits on an antique leather desk-top

July 29, 2022 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

this is the magic of the fear-not ritual

this is why ritual is

so that when you place your hand in the box and

the pain is indescribable

when your fear says: pull away, save yourself

questioning this fear, you remember everyone before who passed this test

generation upon generation who did not pull away

who asked this question: why?

remember this like your own name: pain and fear are two separate things

distinct, divisible, neither inevitable

we mistake them for each other

the experience of one produces the other

but they are separate things

when, from pain, you experience fear

ask it: why?

some pain simply happens

or maybe all things

happen simply

what we call fear is a reflex

the animal retreat

hate is the choice to not question your fear

(July 2022)

Is there such a thing as a blessed ride on the swings?

June 30, 2022 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

For the past few years I have been going to bed so early it’s a problem. I’m missing time with my family, and I’m waking up at 3AM local time for no reason other than I went to bed at 8:30 the night before and I’m a person who does best on 7 hours of sleep.

Why is this interesting? Because lately I’ve been trying to stay awake longer. So after dinner I walk to a local park and ride on the swings until I can’t bear it, then walk home. this is a peculiar aim, given my tendency to get motion sickness from, like, every conveyance I’m not piloting myself. The big swings at the amusement park? Big ol’ yuck (don’t ask me about the pirate ship, me hearties.)

At any rate, there I was, walking across the park at dusk. As I neared the swings I noticed a woman with a rolling walker, doing laps around the playground with the determination of someone told by their doctor to “use it or lose it to amputation.” Someone struggling to stay active in a world that seems bent on her senescence.

With a smile I passed her to claim a swing, where I sat facing the sunset, pumping my legs, riding aloft on a drum and bass playlist that never fails to energize me. I don’t count it a good go on the swings unless I see over the crossbar. One of my characters whose book has yet to be published wrote a poem about swings. In it he writes:

One day you will let go

At the top of the arch of the swing

In spite of the lake and the cliffs and the sky and the steel

You will let go and she will be there

To catch you

I always swing until I see the sky above the crossbar. It was no different tonight, as I leaned into each swoop of the parabola, kicking my legs to arc higher, squinting into the cotton candy summer sunset. Wanting the wind in my hair, I tossed aside my hat, and as the woman with the walker bent to retrieve it I told her to leave it be, that I didn’t mind, that I’d come back to it.

She circled me again, two or three times, before she brought her walker over to the handicapped swing. Then got on the swing and swung along with me.

Was this something she did all the time? Or did my swinging somehow give her permission? I couldn’t have asked. My heart was too full. From her complexion I might guess she wasn’t born in my country, but to say a word about what we were doing felt wholly unnecessary. We swung, me kicking myself as high as I dared, her reclined in a seat made for comfort, made for those to whom swinging might otherwise be a luxury, an impossibility.

When she’d had her fill of the swing, she resumed her circuit round me. When she reached my fallen hat, she bent to pick it up, then tossed it to me.

I just about caught it.

WHAT RUINED ME Episode 4: Not my high school boyfriend

January 7, 2022February 17, 2023 ~ Will Forrest ~ 3 Comments

Not my high school boyfriend.

He was not in high school. I was, quite specifically in the middle of high school, which back then was a five-year hitch if you had intentions of post-secondary.

My mother despised him, in a large part because he reminded her of my father, whose death less than five years before had left a Problematic-Man-shaped crater in my preadolescent heart.

My older boyfriend offered me the sex and drugs I had been looking for. 1980s prohibition messaging had lead me to expect high school to be a smorgasbord of inappropriate behaviour, reefer and bennies and circle jerks being offered at every turn, and I was poised to take advantage. Instead I was in choir and two bands. I had coloured hair and that was sort of insurrectionary. Holed up in my bestie’s basement (except no one was besties because that word didn’t exist yet) scarfing down British music magazines and their lurid descriptions of Madchester rave-ups, I was longing for something strange to happen, primed for absolutely anything.

And when I met him and he offered, I took it. Not because he fooled me, but because it was everything I wanted.

Did I have an ordinary life ahead of me until then? I can’t say that I did. If not that man then another, or a woman, would have offered me something I wanted that I wasn’t meant to have. And I would have taken it. He just got there first.

death and a certain man

September 6, 2021 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

I lost a dear friend this year. He was widely agreed to be one of the most frustrating individuals to ever walk the earth. There was no hiding from him. Your foibles, your feints, your fake news: absolutely fair game, and he brought everyone who cared for him to the point of hair-tearing hysteria at least once.

I learned the lyrics of the Gatchaman theme song for that son of a bitch. In phonetic Japanese.

He was also one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and voraciously devoted to his goals. I think about him a lot, as I did while he still orbited in an embodied form. He was deeply aware of mortality, of the fleetingness of life, and the need to use your time passionately.

What I feel, in grieving him, is that there truly is no meaning in existence beyond what we ourselves provide. Some may want his death to be a ‘message’ from ‘God’ to value your life, but he was passionately secular, and would have fought you with every ounce of his prodigious logic to prove that his morals derived from anything beyond the human need for belonging and connection.

We cannot satisfy this need through cruelty and restriction. We all belong to the human family. We all belong to the earth. Our walls are false. Created by human minds. If there is a divine, it does not pick and choose which of Creation is most glorious. How bold of us to assume. How unhelpful, when the dented little spaceship we call home is closer than ever to being pushed out of the narrow span of livability.

Adam would have known what I mean. He hated that essentialist bullshit. Worked up until the end of his life to make our world more fair.

What else is there to be done?

COMMONPLACE

June 18, 2021 ~ Will Forrest ~ 2 Comments

I’ve tried to blog many times over the years. Aside from my life-long inability to keep any kind of regular diary for more than a few months, blogging about oneself seems incalculably trite. And damnation but I hate a long-worded ramble about people’s family values on my way to their rhubarb pie recipe. Being no great fount of wisdom about any particular thing, I have never felt I had much to write about.

And then I read this piece by Cory Doctorow.

Doctorow is already a bit of a legend, and this goes a very long way towards explaining how and why. It is also the most instrumental, calculating, analytical, yet least mercenary (Doctorow’s emphasis) description of the value of blogs I have ever read. It has altered my worldview considerably, and I say that as a person who actively alters their worldview on the regular. I do enjoy it when an outside force does it for me.

For you TL:DR types, what makes this different from all other advice I’ve read about blogs? It’s the fact that Doctorow’s primary audience is himself. Most advice says to use the blog to make yourself likeable, create a human persona so you can “connect” with your “target audience.” Whatever you do, don’t write about writing, they say, even though my favourite authors blog about writing all the time. Even though we’re meant to “take the reader on our creative journey.” Write instead about your “passion” or some hobby or your pets… then mention to fans of this aspect of yourself that you happen to write books…

This feels like trying to suck up to rich classmates by talking about horses, then asking if they’ll buy your lemonade. Dude, I’m busy. My passion is writing more books. I don’t want to make small talk. If I’m taking the time to write blog posts, it’s gonna have to be about bigger stuff, and it’s going to have to serve me more directly.

“(T)he thought of carrying everything around in a neat little (searchable) package was frankly staggering.”

Doctorow welcomes the public to observe, comment, suggest, reframe and so on, but he blogs first of all to keep a record of his own thinking. Yes, a book or a private e-journal does the same thing, but the internal coding of blog design makes them taggable and searchable. All his ideas, given at least the semblance of coherence, cross referenced, and available all the time, everywhere. I wept, just a little. So much of my time goes to what can only be termed data management that the thought of carrying everything around in a neat little (searchable) package was frankly staggering.

The Commonplace Book as Doctorow describes it is present in mainstream thought most obviously as the Bullet Journal. Many bulleters do indeed publish, as five minutes with the hashtag will reveal.

But I don’t know what I’ll do. Utterly inconclusive I admit, but I have a well-practiced habit of promising more than I can deliver, and so I now make far fewer promises. Is this my Commonplace Book? Comments clearly welcome.