Fiction Friday Drowning Sorrows

What is a sorrow, that it should be able to drown, I asked myself. A thing, surely, if only because it is a noun, but a thought or feeling cannot drown, surely? Yet the universe is a big place full of mysteries and so I set out to find a sorrow that could be drowned, that I could hold in my hand and place in the water or some other liquid and be shut of forever (presuming that was the purpose of drowning the sorrow).

I found sparrows and laurels and yellow things of all sorts, not quite getting the word right. I found memorials and reminiscences and monuments, and walls. Things that could be put into the water many of them, but not readily and only so as to make them wet.

I found sad people and melancholy, rainy wet days and people with their face lifted to the rain. I found people in mourning and people sorrowing for no reason anyone outside their own minds could find cause for.

I found tears and wrung cloths, wreaths, flowers, and spices, herbs and green plants and flowering plants and bight growing things, ease, relief, and cheer.... ooops, not sorrow that, surely, though one came from the prior and led to the next.

I wandered further afield and found empaths that could share sorrow as it suited them, or not, beings who used emotions as energy, troubles and tribbles and purring things offering comfort, soft things to soothe sorrow, and slow smiles and sweet wine, and .... ooops, not sorrow that in the end, either.

So I went home and read a newspaper and found that it was full of sorrows, death, crime, bad decisions, unwise choices, fates and fears and all the things that bring sorrow and I lowered into the sink and pushed it down and watched the soy ink blur, the paper go transparent. I pushed and pulled and the paper became as flakes of ash, fragile and weak and easily crushed and I tore it into shreds with a feather stroke and finally drowned the sorrows into nothing and mixed it into the soil and tucked it around a green, flowering plant and like all sorrows, it waits only a little time to turn it into melancholy and memory to make room for joy.

Okay, that one didn't quite make it into a story but the rules say don't edit, so here it is.

Try cooking again

We laughed at the recent news about food stamps and fast food that suggested fast food could be cheaper than eating in. Not if you are comparing apples to apples, and not if you are paying attention to what you buy! Fast food is cheap food. You can make a lot of hamburgers with a loaf of bread and a pound of cheap ground beef, but you can only buy a couple for the same price. (What, three dollars, maybe as little as two for a quarter pounder, times four for a pound of ground beef, so eight to twelve dollars for a pound of beef and a loaf of bread? Where are these news people doing their shopping? Is it ground filet minon?) You can buy several potatoes for the price of french fries, too.

Now, if you are eating better at home than fast food fare, that's different. In some areas, garden vegetables and even canned and frozen vegetables have gone up in price, but an entire can of green beans, peas, or carrots is still normally cheaper than any dollar menu item, and both healthier and more filling. A 2 liter bottle of soda might cost more than a medium soda but probably less than a large for twice as much. An entire dozen eggs is cheaper than any fast food breakfast sandwich and contains less salt and fat. Yes, fast food is cheaper than a steak grilled at home, but hardly a fair comparison. It's not cheaper than fast food made at home and fast food restaurants for more than an occasional treat aren't a wise choice for anyone on a limited budget or anyone trying to save up for something special.

stats, quilts, and other themes

I can look at some stats on both my blogs and generally do, and try not to let them discourage me. Sometimes they surprise me, like the several weeks that stats showed high readership when I was out of pocket with not means of blogging, followed by a sharp decline starting the day I was able to resume. So they were checking repeatedly to see if I had posted and the real number of readers was the small number, or they gave up just before my return? Lately my numbers on my other blog have been modestly high steadily, then dropped like a rock the last couple of days. Should I blame internet problems, the one day late post, or was it a comment on the theme?

In this case, the latter seems likely enough. I mentioned my 9-11 themed quilted wall hanging I made for a display, just a little thing but I tried to fill it with symbols, maybe a few too many, but collages are like that. Anyway, I know I regularly get a lot of hits from somewhere in the midEast, periodically at least, probably because ene is a word in some Arabic or related language, so maybe the reference didn't go over well. Or maybe some readers had been thinking I was something other than American and were disappointed I wasn't from wherever they thought I was from. But I don't know so I go on and wonder why I keep looking at the numbers. There's always the thought that maybe they will improve tomorrow... and the fact that the news likes to mention big numbers when some site, usually a video clip, goes big, which subtlely conveys the messages that numbers count.

Anyway, I intended to talk about symbology in writing and derailed myself so decided to mention it here. I like using symbols in my quilt and other art projects as occasion permits. i try to be aware when I see it (medieval illuminations are full of it but you need a manual to sort them out and figure out the story as if each mini picture was a hieroglyphic that told a whole story, or a language like they had on Star Trek Next Gen, where they spoke in phrases that were each a reference to a story with the apropriate theme for the message at hand. Sometimes I think the really great writer is the one that can invent such a reference and use it in such a way that the reader not only understands it but is ready to use it in their own natural speech, not even knowing where the word or phrase came from, but I don't think it's the sort of thing you can achieve on purpose.

It is, however, the ultimate sort of metaphor, and the primary way I can think of to build a verbal symbol, especially in a science fiction or fantasy, where presumably the world is different that that of the reader (ignoring magical fantasies and near-future SF set in the contemporary world): a reference to a story that is conveyed to the reader as a small story within the story or described in a sentence or two, an event with a name, a date with a meaning, or a flower or other object that plays a role in one scene to turn it into a symbol of that scene, and its use later. Such symbol goes unnoticed, but if they are there, the discerning reader will eventually appreciate them and they are a way to reward the repeat reader. More subtle ones can be built in with allusions to popular novels and books that the reader might be familiar with even if they can mean nothing to the characters. So, symbols are possible in the verbal arts as well as the visual arts, and like in the visual arts, they might need a translator, but I like to think the stories are the richer, however invisibly, for being there.

What do you think?