Truth comes out when one is flowing, free falling, like doing the Morning Pages of Julia Cameron. Today’s free fall writing, mind you, is not planned or structured. How can it be, when I am speed-writing as I go along?
Writing Prompt- the fool on the hill
I used to sing “the fool on the hill,” if I was alone, maybe on a brisk fall path. It has lots of long notes, the range is not hard, and the song has sympathy for someone. It’s a Beatles song, of course, and I’m not sure all those rich rock gods were sympathetic to people. I still cringe at how Lennon treated his first wife and son.
Then again, Hey Jude, by another Beatle, was composed as sympathy for Lennon’s boy Jules, whom the whole band knew. His mistreated son, neglected even in the will.
But hey, as with Sting songs, we all need a little sympathy. As some sage said, the way to love yourself is through loving others. No, I can’t love Lennon, and I would avoid him at all costs at a party, but Ringo sounds fun and down to earth. I wish I had met George.
Like the fool, I look at the world around me—you know, like a cynical detective, but without the cynicism. Most times. And I talk to myself, on the sidewalk and on the bus, but silently. I try not to move my mouth, but that’s hard if I’m practicing a public speech. So I can identify with the fool that way. And that’s when, like the fool, I am alone.
They say it’s fine to talk to yourself, just don’t start answering yourself. So we often used to say in the army. Why we said that, I don’t know, as I never saw anyone talking to themselves. But ya, we were all a little lonely, or as a US marine said, had “suppressed misery.” Or maybe I did see men talking, it was all so long ago.
Humour is something that works best in a crowd, that emerges when in a crowd. So it occurs to me that “Dad Humour” is when a dad feels slightly alone, since children don’t get it.
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Writing Prompt- pick and shovel
So there I was, working on the rail gang, to get a track built to the rail gun. Nobody was going to get anywhere near our colony, not once we got this finished. I was the captain of this gang. “Let’s get this show on the road” I said, after we had assembled. That’s a bit of dad humour. My crew was too young to remember the phrase, and we didn’t need roads on Ares. All we had to do was steer around perfectly round boulders on the plain. We told our kids, ‘nature doesn’t do straight lines or perfect spheres,’ and then refused to tell them who had made the balls of stone. It was, we adults agreed, with a little more dad humour, ‘for their own good,’ so they could develop their imagination.
You might think we groaned over our shovels to move the dirt, like in those holos from out on Earth. Nope. We used the pickaxe to pulverize the ground, because then the soil was as easy as spooning sugar, but with a really big spoon.
I told the crew they were ‘Armstrong shovels,’ although they were clearly labeled ‘Black and Dekker,’ because they operated with strong arms. Manually. From the Latin and Spanish word for arm. The kids didn’t get that one either, since it was so easy to erect a Waldo frame and have the machine amplify one’s efforts.
The kids, out in the middle of the plain with just each other for company, made their own fun. Sometimes they clumped around “fee fi of fum” like a giant. Other times it was “fee fi, fiddily I oh” and I was “the captain shouting.”
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Sean Crawford
In the C-space building
October
2025
Morning Pages from The Artists Way: I enjoyed doing the pages, on my own from the book— I won’t return to doing them. Others I have known did them as a weekly course, they all sounded so enthusiast about it.
Essays: I have mentioned Paul Graham’s web writing about essays before. His piece, A version 1.0 gives a look at how real-world essays require a lot of editing. Note that he doesn’t try to merely do three points, as schoolchildren do.
Essay blog reminder: if you find a blog you like, going back years, then for Pete’s sake don’t try to read in reverse order, lest your poor eyes glaze over. Simply pick out the same month as the current month, skipping down the years.
