Losing Control and Gaining Sanity

Photo by kurokayo .  licensed under
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

We lost power last week and I had an interesting experience roughing it.  When we first lost power, I spent several hours setting up the small generator we have and running extension cords into the house.  I had a devil of a time starting that generator.  I eventually had to get some ether to turn it over, but I didn't figure that out until I had tried a couple hundred pulls and injured my shoulder in the process. But I got it going, and then I had a space heater running in one room.  That one room was tolerably warm, but the rest of the house was very cold.  There's nothing quite like sleeping in a cold house to put things in perspective.  And getting out of your warm bed and going out into the cold, snowy night to check on a stalled generator at 4am puts an awful lot of things into perspective!

I know a lot of people hated losing power, but I found the experience to be oddly cathartic.  It was a break from the normal routine and it imposed some physical hardship that re-focused the daily pleasures we take for granted.  When the power came back after about thirty hours, I felt renewed and refreshed.  Every part of my normal (warm!) routine was now a joy.  Alas, this feeling of bliss only lasted about a week.  But, on the bright side, we may lose power again tomorrow.  I look forward to the incoming "Nor'easter" storm with a mixture of dread and anticipation.  I don't really want to lose power, but my soul might need to.

Maybe this positive take away from losing power is telling me I need to plan some camping trips or other outings to get away from modern civilization and its myriad of tempting and mind-numbing conveniences.  I'm still parsing the whole experience (and there may be more data to collect tomorrow), but this is my early conclusion.

I've been reading some varied books lately.  I've read books about alien abductions, men in black and government conspiracies.  I've also read a book about the American campaign in western Europe in World War II, and now I'm reading a medical drama set in east Africa.  It's a diverse set of topics.  The modus operandi here is people give me books as gifts and I read them when I need a break from my usual genres.  I am enjoying the variety.  And it's nice to read something unusual and outside my normal comfort zone from time to time.

Work on Hemlock book four is proceeding at my usual slow but steady pace.  This novel will hopefully be the Magnum opus of my writing life.  Actually, it may end up being the Magnum opus of my life.  It's hard to see past this book and this series.  I have a couple of book ideas waiting in the wings, but the Hemlock books are different.  In addition to being pure adventure stories, they represent nothing less than a distillation of the sum of my total life experience up to this point.  And by that I mean there is a spectrum of ideas from the various epochs of my own evolution as a person "baked" into these tales.  I think the first novel has parallels to a figurative representation of my teens and twenties.  That book was like a creative explosion of writing energy built up over decades of dormancy.  The sequel was still frantic in parts, but it was more measured and thoughtfully constructed--maybe like my thirties?  The third book is too soon out of the gate for me to put a finger on where it will fit.  I think it's the first book where I had to start weaving the story toward a conclusion as opposed to introducing new elements.  Is that a parallel to middle age?  This fourth book is bringing it all home, and it's building toward pivotal scenes I imagined many years ago and will finally be able to write.  The melody from "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" (the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey) comes to mind.  This is probably hubris but it's no coincidence.  I'm swinging for the fences on this one!

The next installment of my "Gaming as a Metaphor for Life" series should be posted soon!  Thanks for reading!