Peace (except for the golf balls that keep ricocheting off the wall and over to my chair 😠)

When I meekly tell someone I have a blahg, if they get all excited, I am quick to say, “My blahg is like watching paint dry.” It’s not that I don’t want people to follow it, it’s more that I don’t want them to have high expectations for enlightening content written up in sparkling prose and illustrated by beautiful photooos only to find that it’s just some baggy old bag’s daily life. Watching paint dry.

But boy oh boy, did I get things stirred up this week! I managed to actually create Comment Contentiousness after my “flag” post. I am sorry. It was a clumsy post, mainly because I’m not exactly sure what I was trying to say. It’s like today when FZ and I were digging down into a deeeeeeep Rabbit Hole and I found a vague statement in an old spec that I thought might shine a light onto the issue. It didn’t (exactly) and I finally said, “y’know, that one sentence there is exactly the kind of thing a BA writes when she[he] has no clue what the heck people are talking about.”

I finished Beloved by Toni Morrison, a black writer who died recently if you have no clue (and I’m guessing I have a couple of readers who don’t and I know who they are 🐽). I LOVED this book and it has me casting about a bit for what to read next. Probably something different but this one is a hard act to follow.

A couple disclaimers: I am a blonde WASPy type person who has NO clue what a black American’s experience is like (shaddup you guys and you know who you are). I grew up in a northern outpost where there were (and are) few black folks and while there are plenty of people of all colors here on the largely liberal college town Planet Ann Arbor, the majority of us are white and most people of all colors are pretty well educated. Also, I am not a Toni Morrison scholar or even an English major (although I was once invited to be one – thank you very much, I’ll play my flute [she said but little did she know…]).

Before reading the book, I read a GoodReads review by someone who didn’t understand the book. Why read it, he asked? Well. Toni tells this story in an incremental way in which she travels back and forth in time and provides details about things and later fits them into a coherent story line. Could I always follow/understand what was going on? No, at least not in “the moment”. But overall, it was a beautiful story with a definite, identifiable sequence of events and a wee bit of weirdness, which I *always* love.

Hahahahah! For context, the book I read *before* Beloved was a Haruki Murakami book, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, which I also loved.

So my Beach Basket contains several items besides this rainbow of sunglasses. (I like the yellow ones the best because I can still see my phone screen when I’m reading.) Guess what some of those items are.

One Response to “Peace (except for the golf balls that keep ricocheting off the wall and over to my chair 😠)”

  1. Margaret Says:

    Hmmm, your blog, your opinion, your words. If others feel free to spout off their opinions, why can’t we counter them, even if it causes dissention? My town has become more diverse but is still predominantly white and Christian. (and not always very accepting, especially of different cultures and religions)