Me and My Analogies

A few days ago, my friend Bob and I were flipping analogies back and forth as we proofed A Course of Love for its transformation to the Kindle. It was sort of a Buddhist/Christian mishmash. He started it. I think the first analogy he proffered was of watercolor painting. Of clouds.

It was kind of fun, but also one of those things you do when you’re proofing. My own personal limit (or so I found) was eight chapters at a time. I’m not sure what Bob’s limit was, or Jeremy’s, another friend who offered a third pair of eyes.

I’ve also just received the proof of the Course books from Create Space, Amazon’s print-on-demand arm. They tell you to proof your new copy three times. Once for layout. Once for images. Once for typos. Since my files are the same ones as used previously, I’m not proofing for typos. This isn’t because the books are perfect, but because they’re in PDF form and to change the few small typos is not doable for me or cost-effective to have done by someone else. That’s the nice thing about the Kindle (at least when you have a little help from your friends). You can go forth with the idea that with three pairs of eyes, you’ll find everything. You’ll get perfection. You’ll use semi-colons when you need to. (I could definitely find an analogy there about going for perfection.)

But you get the idea from which I’m writing. I’m flipping pages. This is a labor of love but the desire to get up and, oh, I don’t know, clean the toilet or make dinner, is almost as strong as the analogy craze.

Since I’ve been so wrapped up in this stuff, my mind has gone kind of blank. I want to sit and just write something fun or creative, respond to the latest excellent editorial from David Brooks, anything that is off this track I’ve been on…just for the variety of it.

But something prevents me. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s fuzzy brain. I hope so. It feels almost like writer’s block, that dreaded malady about which you are told Write through it! I could make an analogy out of that too. I’m seeing a lot of analogies instead of friends. We’re getting buddy-buddy. Me and my analogies.

The writing one would look, (as everything else does) like a spiritual analogy. But I’m too fuzzy-brained to make it good, so I’ll share instead my vacuum cleaner analogy.

My son gave me, for my birthday, a robot that does my vacuuming. Great sin of useless luxury, but nice both for my arm and the fights Angie and I have had about it (since it's her chore...oh what useless falderal all that’s been). Anyway, you can’t set the darn thing down where all the cat hair is and have it get it up. No. It is programmed to “find the perimeter.” The theory goes that once it finds the four corners of the room, it will go back and get the middle. This actually works in a room like my bedroom that is virtually a square and has a door I can close. But in the living room/dining room area there is too much openness. I’ve tried blocking the open places but this is like doing all kinds of work to avoid work. (I could make an analogy out of that too.)

I'm not exactly sure I can spell out the robot analogy either, but here’s what I suggested to Bob (which means I’m borrowing from my own e-mail writing to write this blog! …under the theory of working my way through not having anything to write). Anyway, here it is.

This finding of the perimeter seems a bit like what we do in life. We head off to the four corners, defining our territory and thinking we’ll get back and clean up the center. But if we remain open, there’s so much ground to cover we might feel as if we never get back to the shit pile (oh, did I mean the cat hair pile?), and if we create barriers to openness or close the door, we get clean, but we’re closed off.

I’ve become content with letting the robot vacuum the rooms that sit at the outer reaches of the house (it’s a rambler): my sunroom office on one side, and my bedroom on the other. For the middle, the big sweeping “L” of the living and dining room, I do the work myself.

That's it. All I've got tonight!