Slugs and Sky

I've been trying to declutter my house for years, ever since we moved in here, really, but earnest work in this area was only really accomplished last summer and this summer. Despite these efforts, however, I've entered a new phase of hoarding: now my iCloud account is filled with clutter.

Slug.

This is because I compulsively take photos of just about everything, like my friend here, whom I tried to capture next to the leaf for scale and while he was stretched out fully, but only one of those two things was accomplished, clearly. This fucker was LONG. Like, I could have put a leash on him and raised him as a pet. But I didn't. Because slug.

Ultimately my hoarding of pictures is really a symptom of severe Fear of Missing Out, like I can't possible remember something unless I document it with a picture and what if I can't remember it? What then am I made of?

And if I'm a sum of my memories and experiences, does this mean I'm comprised of fluffy clouds, decaying foliage, and invertebrate mollusks?

Apparently.

Anyway, THIS fluffy, decaying, invertebrate mollusk is going to spend the morning with some members of her writing group, working on the next scene of my play. I made good progress two weeks ago -- when my writing group met consistently -- and then no progress the next week when everyone I knew left for vacation and I had no childcare and had to *gasp* LOOK AFTER MY OWN DAMN KIDS (which, of course, means limited writing time). 

Morning sky, Long Island.

So today I'll be picking that back up again and hopefully developing it further. I've found that writing plays, or even prose pieces, like this blog entry, really require more time for deeper focus and concentration than the 45 minutes or so I have during my early morning writing time. That time is reserved for working on individual poems, or reading poems, or just thinking and drinking coffee and listening to the crickets chirp in the pre-dawn dark. Of course, poems need deep focus and concentration, too, but they also need that kind of quiet and good loneliness that comes from waking up before everyone else. And I find that if I'm writing a worthwhile poem, even if I have to stop writing it mid-inspiration, it's possible to pick it back up again the next day.

Of course, that's my hope. There is a big part of me, of course, that fears the possibility of all of my poems being a load of detritus and slug trail anyway.

I managed to finish that sonnet from last week and began work on another little metrical number that may or may not be another sonnet. I'm about 8 lines in and there might be a turn approaching and I *might* be able to figure out what I'm trying to say by lines 13 & 14 but also I might just let the poem figure out what it's saying in 20 or 30 lines, closer to something Edward Thomas (my boyfriend, along with James Wright, my other boyfriend), but for now, it's a mess of an extended metaphor and rhyme and I'm just playing around with it.

I bet you're so very happy to know that.

Anyway, books I'm still reading: The Prodigal (which is slim and could be read in a day but I'm enjoying it, damnit, so I'm gonna take my time!), The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, and Drowning in Sand.

I watched Lion last Saturday and was a big ugly crying mess through much of the movie, which is really unlike me because I'm not a crier in general, but I'm *really* not a crier when it comes to movies (because of my stony immovable heart), so either I'm getting soft and sappy in my old age (very possible) or that movie's fucking devastating. 

Maybe both?