Why Was I Resisting This?

From Steven Pressfield's The War of Art:

Most of us have two lives. The life we live and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance....Are you a writer who doesn't write, a painter who doesn't paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.

And Bubba, I know what Resistance is. It has kicked my butt a thousand ways: procrastination, perfectionism, distraction, vanity, self-loathing, addiction. Sometimes Resistance resorts to controlling me with heart-stopping terror, but most of the time it gets off cheap, with nothing more than slight fluttering fears. But not today; today, I win.

How do I know I've won? Because in about 5 minutes, come hell or high water, I'm going to click the button that says "Publish Post." I will. I swear I will.

But first, I have to tip my hat to Resistance by fiddling around with the font size and format, by proofreading 12 times, by wigging out about who will read this and what they will think, by dinking around with every comma and semicolon, by patting myself on the back one more time for being a good speller, and then asking the spell-checker to confirm this fact, just in case. Plus, I'm getting a little hungry for lunch and there is a nice piece of pot roast calling my name from the fridge. Okay, maybe it'll be more like 20 minutes, tops, before I click "Publish."

No, no. It will be now, here, this minute. I win.

Changing Blog Address

Oh...silly me...I just realized that I started this blog for my lost pet recovery business, which, I see now, is entirely too narrow. I need a big wide river in which to wash, to wade, to cast a line for bright sparkling fish. Thus, the name/address change.

One of the great things about workamping is that you have time to fiddledefart with your gadgets!

Straight But Not Narrow

I've always said that I have a hard time making friends. I'm prickly, standoffish, and have a hard time keeping a pleasant look on my face. I've known this all my life.
Yet, I suddenly noticed the other day, that I have 5 new friends who say they love me every time we speak. One is the husband of my friend, Vicki. Maybe I shouldn't say that Bill is a new friend--I've known him for 5 years now--but I just noticed the I-love-you thing. He also calls me BonBon, a true sign of friendship.
Another is Chris, a woman who lives across the street from the campground where we're parked. Chris is a little gnome of a woman who befriended me when I trespassed (just a little) on her property because my dog could not resist the delicious scent of mice that inhabit her land. Chris and her husband, "The Buzzard," just celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary. First we waved. Then we chatted. Then we exchanged phone numbers, and now we love each other.
Friends #3 and #4 are Nan and Leota, an older gay couple whom I fell in love with immediately. My husband and I spotted them right away when they pulled into the campground in their motor home.
"Do you think they're nuns?" John said.
"I doubt it," I said. "One of them is drinking a beer. At 10 a.m."
"Nuns drink," John said.
I gripped him by the shoulder and said, "Honey, they aren't nuns."
"Oh."
It's almost impossible to find fellow Democrats in any campground. But especially here in the Bush-land of Texas, it's almost solid Republicans. I thought I spotted an Obama t-shirt on one of them, probably Nan, and since I think of myself as straight-but-not-narrow, I found the first excuse to mosey through their campsite. Now we love each other.
My newest friend is Seth, the grandson of another fellow camper. I would've guessed he's no more than 25, but I hear he's in his forties. It's too bad that the term "simple-minded" is out of vogue--it describes Seth perfectly. I don't know what the right term is, but you get the idea.
My husband is comfortable with people like Seth and greeted him warmly. I sort of ducked around the corner. But Seth sidled up to me anyway, put his big arm around my shoulder.
"Seth loves blondes," his grandpa joked. And apparently he doesn't care how brassy the blonde or that its wearer is nearly 50.
Later that day, he wrote me a note:

Hi Bonnie,
I am glad you're here.
I love you.
You are special.
You are my friend,
from Seth

Maybe I should stop saying that I don't make friends easily. Maybe it's just one of those lies I've been telling myself all my life.

I Hate Writing

Oh...I just had the greatest conversation with my neice, Jenny, on the topic of filling our creative void, finding our creative voice.
I told her (in confidence of course) that I am a really good writer, but that I hate writing.
Jenny said, "I never knew that."
"No, it's true," I said. "It hurts me to write. It hurts my shoulders and my hands. It hurts my neck...Once, my husband called me at home while I was working on my master's thesis. He called me at 9 a.m. to ask me how it was going. I told him I was stuck on this one idea--I don't remember now what it was--and that I had been pounding away on this one sentence for, like, an hour."
I told Jenny that he called me two hours later to check on me and I had only written two sentences since then and I was really no closer to finishing my thought than I had been when he called before.
"I get all sweaty," I told Jenny. "I bite the inside of my lip until it's raw. I'm really good at it, I told her, but it hurts."
It's not like painting, I told her, where I enjoy the process (sort of), where there is a logical progression from thinking and looking to sketching and drawing, then (heavens open) and color is applied, light is brought to paper and heaven is brought to earth.
"Writing's not like that," I told her. "It's excruciating."
But I am a good speller, a very good word picker, and an excellent orderer of words . I can do it, it's just very painful.
Jenny said, "I never knew that. That must be terrible."
It is. Trust me, it is.