March 27, 2004
Maybe it has something to do with control issues. Maybe it’s a matter of always trying to achieve a personal vision. Maybe it just means that I like to play. Whatever it means, it means that I waste of lot of time on projects that don’t work.
I buy unusual clothes on sale and not my size because I figure I’ll re-make them into something that suits me. It only works half the time. I find interesting recipes and then add, subtract, and substitute until I have something either exquisite or inedible. I find patterns for knitted and crochet items that I like and then change the yarn and needle size so that I have to figure out a revised gauge and then do a lot of ripping out and re-doing.
I write a poem and then fiddle with, remove, replace, insert and otherwise tinker with words until, like all my other projects, I either embrace what it has become or else throw it away.
I tinker with everything in my life unless it/they is/are close to my heart. Those things and people I take as they are. Or at least I try.
Sort of related to this whole idea of tinkering is Rage Boy. I haven’t picked on him in a while, and I probably wouldn’t except that I’m on an email list of his, and I can’t resist reading what he sends.
Chris likes to tinker with the ideas of others. No, wait a minute. He doesn’t really tinker, does he? He blasts with his creative bombast. That’s OK. He’s got a right.
But it all makes me wonder if he ever reads any poetry. I mean, early on in our lives, we marvel at the moon winking at us from above the rooftops outside our parent’s bedroom window. And then, one day we look around and find ourselves mired in markets and melancholy and missing the pure poetry that can be tinkered from our private pain. We project instead of protect.
It seems to me that tinkering taken to extremes is attacking. I suppose there’s a time and place for each, and, of course, we are each free to choose how we find satisfaction in life somewhere along the continuum.
I’m happy tinkering. Except, of course, when it comes to current national politics. I’m all for cutting off those little PPs.
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