Recently my eyes changed, so I got new glasses.

The world seems to be changing.  Very blurry.  Now what?  Can’t buy glasses for that.

So I rearranged my furniture.  Because you can do that.  Its an old trick in the book; we call it Feng Shui. And now I love this room again, spilling out into life itself.  The room felt stagnant and out of focus because I felt stagnant and out of focus.  And the room that I once loved no longer supports how I want to feel.  Who put this couch here!? 

You did dummy, back in the spring when you wanted to cut things off…

I can’t imagine not rearranging my furniture with some frequency.  People who don’t rearrange cant imagine living in a house that significantly changes at random intervals.  My friend Nancy hasn’t rearranged her house in 40 years, and I love visiting her in their very cozy bungalow.  But I don’t live there.  If I did, seeing the same chair in the same space day after day would impossibly aggravate me.  I simply don’t get it…if you have a favorite chair (and you should) how can you possibly want to look in the same direction for the rest of your life? If I lived in Nancy’s house the bedroom would be in the kitchen by now.

I rearrange furniture to rearrange my thinking.  Last night I started moving things around after work.  I walked into the room, everything looked wrong so I started pushing and pulling and lifting.  10 pm it’s done:  vacuumed, dusted, straightened.  7 am the next morning, candles lit and coffee, I am seeing life completely differently.  Literally.  I used to sit on this couch and look at a huge tree which frankly looks overgrown now and blocks the view.  Now I sit on this couch and look down valley, 27 shades of green with the sunlight bouncing off miles of life.

I am under no illusion that I won’t be back at it 3 or 4 months from now.  Which naturally makes me think of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Creative Writing 101” from Bagombo Snuff Box. How do we know he didn’t rearrange his living room before producing such fine advice? Number 7 is my favorite.  You?

FROM BAGOMBO SNUFF BOX, Introduction

“Now lend me your ears.  Here is Creative Writing 101:

  1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
  2. Give the reader at least once character he or she can root for.
  3. Every character should want something, eve if it is only a glass of water
  4. Every sentence must do one of two things–reveal character or advance the action.
  5. Start as close to the end as possible.
  6. Be a sadist.  No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful thing happen to them–in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
  7. Write to please just one person.  If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
  8. Give your readers as much information as soon as possible.  To heck with suspense.  Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

-Kurt Vonnegut

On a side note, if you’ve never done it, you can pick up a Kurt Vonnegut book and it will always magically speak to you.  Right now I am going to stand up and find the first Vonnegut book on my shelf.  I have it:  A Man Without a Country.  If you haven’t read it, you should. I love this book. It’s wise and funny, unapologetic and kind from a writer who walked the road and took the time to write about it. 

I open the book, randomly to page 66.  Below the drawing of an asterix, which makes me smile because I know this to be a drawing of an asshole from his beloved book “Breakfast of Champions”, it says this:

“No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.  If ever I die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED

FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

WAS MUSIC.”

Wow!  Told you, magic!!