When It All Came Tumbling Down

     Our group focused mainly on The House of Cards section.  In it, we found that the author's little brother is either very sick or has cancer.  He is treated like a very fragile little china doll, as their mother habitually passes by the door looking in to make sure nothing's wrong.  He is so cared for that the author is always left alone with his brother.  In response to passing the time, they both would go to the "Spartan Room."  Although this room is small and enclosed, surrounded by four walls, this room is where they lose track of time the most.  It's a small room, but the imagination has no limits.
     House of the future, dream house, dog house, house of cards, house on fire, bringing down the house, house call, the house of God.  From these titles of each section, you can easily see a pattern.  From a dream house to a house where many only ever show up because of a death (church).  I think that if many of us start with the house of God, we won't have to end with it.  Like a house of cards, each with four corners, all a small step to something bigger; the greater the inevitable fall, a house of cards.
     In conclusion, we all will get to that point in our lives one way or another; whether it's being born with a terminal illness, or reaching old age.  We all come to the conclusion that death is around the corner, we then start wondering about the afterlife.  I guess we all need a "Spartan Room" of our own.  Mine, is Jesus.  He rebuilds ruins, restores broken homes, and shows me how limiting our imaginations can truly be.

For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, 
that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, 
that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love,  may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height— 
to know the love of Christ which surpasses all knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above ALL that we Ask or Think or Imagine (Spartan Room), according to the power that works in us... (Ephesians 3:14-20, NKJV)

Our Prayers.  Our Thoughts.  Our Imaginations.
They do not limit our God.
They set standards, sure, but only to be gloriously broken.
They only provoke Him into showing us up.
It's His way of displaying how great He truly is.
And that is what lives inside of us, God.  (Ephesians 3:20, ME)

When it all comes tumbling down, just know that God will be waiting.

The Fifth Story

     One story, five different approaches?  Or five stories, and only one approach?  That being to totally confuse it's readers.  Or maybe it's not even a story at all.

     The first opens up with a bland, boring, and a straight-to-the-point version of the story.  The narrator is complaining about how her apartment is infested by a band of cockroaches.  A friend overhears and gives her a simple recipe on how to kill them.

     In the second version of the story, the narrator contemplates the morality of killing cockroaches.  They crawl up the pipes from downstairs, they don't even know of her existence, and they mind their own business.  So why is she so worked up over them if they don't even give her a second thought, or a first for that matter?

     In the third story, the cockroaches are no longer cockroaches anymore but a dehumanized, no feelings, inanimate thing.  They become statues, lifeless objects.  The narrator then compares them to the statues from Pompeii, where inevitable disaster overtook them, exactly the the cockroaches.

     In the fourth, the narrator realizes that this one act of exterminating the cockroaches could lead to more.  One night of killing can't be the solution, maybe only a handful of cockroaches died and their is yet to be an end.  Maybe the killing will never stop.  At this point in the story, the narrator begins to over exaggerate the reality of the situation.

     Last but not least, the fifth story starts off with its title, being "Leibnitz and the Transcendence of Love in Polynesia."  Considering the fact that the title of this whole thing is, "The Fifth Story," I would assume that everything boils down to this one story.  In conclusion, I think that the author was trying to explode our minds.  Every story opens up and explains that she's complaining about some cockroaches.  Then we get a different interpretation, feeling, and tone of her heart towards the killings.  But then the fifth story just gives us a title and ends with the beginning of all the other stories, "I was complaining about the cockroaches."  Maybe the author just wants us to make up our own ending with the little clues already given.  Either way, I really enjoyed reading this story, it didn't help me at anything like broadening my view of literature, it was just a good read.

Fiction Writing

     I personally feel that fictional stories are what keep us human.  Fiction keeps us sane and grounded from this life.  This may sound really weird, so let me explain.  We as a whole, tend to become, for lack of better words (more like, because I've always wanted to say that, but I digress) We become non-human, or less human.  We live life by constant worrying.  We always stress out when the next paycheck will come in.  We seek stability by keeping ourselves busy.  And I feel that fictional stories are what help our non-humane lives of always working, and stressing, and going mad.

     Fiction has always been the genre of literature that we run to in order to escape this wretched so-called life of ours.  We leap over this abyss of time and space and camp out in a new world, all found in the imagination of our little minds.  In other words, it's normal in this day and age to be that guy who stresses over hardship.  And that is, in my opinion, an insane way to live.  What bothers me is that it's normal, which is why opening up a fairytale, novel, or just a book in general,  helps to keep us sanely human.

     Sir Ken Robinson said a lot of things on TED Talk so I'll just paraphrase his 20 minute speech.  This is what he said, "Kids will take a chance.  They're not frightened of being wrong.  If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.  And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity.  They have become frightened of being wrong.  We stigmatize mistakes.  And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.  We are educating people out of their creative capacities.  Picasso once said, 'All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.'  We don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it."

Fiction is our thoughts, imaginations, and ideas written down.  In the end, I just feel like I'm rambling and not making any sense.  Maybe we should just all drink a Capri-Sun once and a while.  Maybe then life will get better.  The End.

Fiction Packet

     Today in class, I overheard my group speaking about a poem as I was reading my own to the side.  They started to laugh hysterically about how the end of this one poem has a guy running out of a store screaming, "DRIVE! DRIVE!" as if they just robbed a store or something.  And after hearing my group, I actually started to laugh myself, not knowing the full story and context of the poem.  Class is over and now I'm home flipping through the poems hoping to find something when I stumble upon this poem, Allen Woodman's Wallet.  It's about a father who gets tired of having his wallet stolen every time he leaves the house.  So to get rid of his problem, he stuffs a decoy wallet full of bad lottery tickets, expired food coupons, and a fortune cookie that reads, "Life is the same old story over and over."  Which is ironic in that his wallet is always getting stolen.  But what surprises me is how this cookie's fortune is actually the opposite of what really happens in the end.  Now I won't ruin it for those of you guys who haven't read it yet, so I'll just leave you with this last thought.  I finally know why my group was laughing so hard.

City Eclogue: Pages 54-55

     The poem that really caught my eye, and I mean really, is found on pages 54-55.  What I thought was funny, was how the poem opens up.  First, it sounds all elegant and very complex, something that might need re-reading and some of that over-analysis we all think we need when reading these kinds of intricate poems.  It even goes so far as to use the word après, which needed me to google it in order to even get a grip of what I was reading.  So to re-cap, it starts off all elegant until I finally get passed the that fancy word.  This is where the funny part comes in.  Now, I'm not sure what this poem is even really about, something that has to do with some mob bosses getting paid.  Nonetheless, I discovered that every time there was a long pause between words, you could easily replace those long pauses with curse words.  For example,

     "And they say God

      this is a great fudging countryland
      of opportunity! Get me

      a piece of that shiz"

And so on.  I don't know if I'm just losing it, but I'm pretty sure I'm right on this one.

Heather McHugh from Best American Poetry

And What Do You Get

"Eleven tons of hidden work are always lurking inside words."  Just by tweaking a little here and there, you can fully manipulate words to mean something totally different and unrelated.
     I didn't really know what poem to really talk about until the very last minute of class when someone brought this poem to light.  Every single poem that we've looked at so far either didn't make sense and needed explanation or had a mind of its own.  Until I saw this one.  Yes, it still has a mind of its own but unlike the others, it makes you think without hurting your head too much.  It takes baby steps in order to explain a simple concept and yet its quirks are still hard to figure out, if that makes sense.  For example,

     "Excise the er from exercise.  Or from
      example, take ex out: now it's bigger;" ...which makes "ample."

Simple, right?  Just a play on words.  But it takes it a step further like this,

     "to be lonely, take the amp out
      and replace it with an i." ...which makes "exile."

     Although I've figured out most of the poem, I can't help but feel like I haven't even begun to fully grasp it.  I feel as if there's more to it then just mixing the words around.  Now, I don't feel like explaining it to you, so I won't.  I'll just leave the rest to you.

Initiation Tool

     First thing's first, I'll begin with something simple.  I was inspired.  Inspired by Julia Cameron's, The Right to Write.  A corny title, yes, but the first chapter didn't take the long way 'round, instead it just went forward.  Although, somewhere deep down inside, I feel as if the word, "inspire" is a bit too much, it's just too out there.  I feel a sense of let down when I continue to say this word aloud, in my mind that is.  Too many people get inspired which then leads them into attempting to do whatever it was that inspired them, only to either stop half way and just simply give up altogether or just continue to dream about what could of been.  And that's probably why I'm here now writing away, or should I say, "hanging out on this page."  Whatever the reason may be, I like it.  I like where I am right now, writing away about stuff, but more the sense of just being here.  I like that I don't have to worry about time and how more wrong I could make this sound, so I won't.  Before I end this little journal thing, I should probably write a little more just to make it look like I did something worth grading, so I'll end this with a couple more long run-on sentences.  So, this is me tipping my hat at you, peruse at your leisure.
     On a small note, you should of made us read this book a long time ago, first chapter though, I hate reading long stuff; I feel so smart now.  I feel like if I continue like this for all my journal topics, I won't put them off until the last minute like I did this one.  Now, I will go back to where I was before I decided to write this.  Good day.