Morning Pages - 12.0

[ed_rex]

Woke up this morning leaving my job at the high-rise offices of no less a publishing empire than Playboy magazine itself. What precisely I did was and remains unclear, but my duties were of editorial nature and, as such - though he did not make an appearance - ones that brought me into regular, if not frequent, contact with "Hef" himself. Were I an average North American of (ahem) a Certain Age, it might be noteworthy that I did not even once come into contact with one of the famous Bunnies. But I am not and never have been an average North American and even as a callow adolescent, the Playboy Bunny never much appealed to me as an example of male sexuality (what? ya thought that bourgeois version of Neverland was an example of female sexuality? Puh-lease!).

Meanwhile, I worked with a woman I was once very close to, but with whom I long ago had a major falling-out, culminating in one of my infamous, multi-page letters, to which (in life) she replied with a brief note that said something like, "Fuck you. Then I'll get new friends."

Many years later, we had a reconciliation of sorts, brought on mostly by the scouring of the winds of time, rather than any real change of mind or heart on either of our parts.

Nevertheless, in the dream, the wounds were still raw and bloody and I awoke as we stormed off in different directions.

But what I find kind of delightful, from an amateur of cheap psychoanalysis, is my guess as to why Playboy should have figured in the dream at all. In short, it was Henry Kuttner's fault.

Y'see, while briefly conscious yesterday (I think I managed 8 hours), I pulled from my shelf a 35 year-old copy of The Best of Henry Kuttner, who under such names as Lewis Padgett (when writing with his wife, C.L. Moore) and Lawrence O'Donnell, among many others as well as his own, was one of the best pulp and post-pulp short story writers in the business. He (and Moore, as I recall, though her name is nowhere to be found in the volume at hand) wrote the marvelous story, "Mimsy Were the Borogoves", to which I have elsewhere alluded from time to time. But I digress.

I was getting to the mysterious workings of dream-consciousness.

Now, Kuttner died in 1958 and to my knowledge never made an appearance in the pages of Playboy. But the volume from which I read last night contains an introduction by Ray Bradbury, whose prose has graced those slick (and oft-slickened - ahem) pages. Indeed, one such appearance was the primary reason I bought my 2nd (of 4, in total) issue of that magazine, many years ago.

Though why my former friend should also have put in an appearance is a less-clear example of workings of my unconscious. The origins of that strand in the web remain a mystery to me.

But onwards.

Bradbury praised Kuttner as the man who told him (Bradbury) to "shut up", to stop talking about the stories he wanted to write and to sit down and actually write them. Bradbury claimed he thenceforth wrote a story a week and so reminded me that my own biggest problem is my continuing lack of discipline.

And so, having mostly emerged from my brief illness (the cough is still there but no longer painful, the nose barely running; thanks for asking) and feeling re-energized from sleeping 16 hours out of 24 over the past few days, I feel once again inspired to "shut up" and "just do it".

And so, I'm off. Exercise, breakfast, then some serious time behind the keyboard.

Comments

[sooguy.livejournal.com]

"my own biggest problem is my continuing lack of discipline"

I hear you on that one, brother! Good luck with the writing.

Very interesting twisted dream post.

Discipline (and Lack Thereof)

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

Your comment made me break one of the "rules" of morning pages: I went back and re-read the post. And, y'know? I kind of enjoyed reading it - a nice surprise!

Thanks for the kind words and good wishes.