Recently, I caught my wife reading some of my blahgs.
There isn’t anything wrong with that so don’t read anything into my action of catching her doing something that is perfectly normal. I was just taken aback is all. In some sullen moments when I find my wife and I at distances, I think about the fact that she doesn’t even ready my blahg! I guess I can’t use that argument anymore. I guess I should also watch what I write here.
I haven’t anything to hide. There is nothing in any of my blahgs that I am ashamed for having written. I try to tell the truth here or offer my opinion on what’s happening or what interests me. One fact: I like The Weepies! I’ve said that before and I’m listening to them now as I write this blahg. Here they are live at the Brit Festival in Southern Orgeon on August 23, 2011:
The title of this blahg comes from that old bumper sticker you used to see on many cars. IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU’RE TOO CLOSE. The perception is that if you could read the bumper sticker then you were tailgating or following too close behind the vehicle in front of you and that could be a dangerous thing. But I think there is another interpretation. In the case of my blahg, if you can read this, you’re too close…to me. That doesn’t mean you’re standing too close to me but rather the other definition of being close to me through relation or friendship. You know who I am and what I’m all about. That’s as close as you can really get to anyone.
I don’t have a problem with anyone who is close to me reading anything I write. I guess I really have a problem with myself because I don’t write enough for people to read. These blahgs have too much time passing between the reading of each. I haven’t written any fiction in a long time. I barely write my signature any more, for that matter. My output has dwindled to reminder notes or shopping lists or appointment dates on the calendar. The last thing I wrote of any meaning was a short verse in the Valentine’s Day card I gave to my wife. That’s sad. The verse wasn’t sad but the fact that I’m not writing any more is a low point.
I always believed I was a good writer and thought I had promise. I have even self-published a volume of my Christmas themed material, “Proof For Believing”. Before that, I wrote a novel called “False Ducks” that sadly sits unpublished. Everything stops after that. Only these blahgs continue. These blahgs were meant to be an outlet for my creativity and to be a forum for my previously written material. But I’ve failed even at that. I’ve barely posted here, anything of my own. Certainly nothing new other than the blahg of the week or month.
I want to rectify some of that. 
I want to share some of my earlier writing. When Jeanette and I first started as friends in 1984, she gave me a “Nothing Book”. It’s basically a blank journal that I wrote poems in for two years. Not all of them were winners but I wrote steadily. I really like the second poem from this volume, “Almost Day 8,124”. The title comes from the fact that this poem was written on the 8,124th day since I was born. I was 22 and the “Almost” refers to the fact that I think it was the 8,124th day since my birth but the math could be wrong. Click on the image to see a larger version of this handwritten ode. Here it is in typed format:
Yes, I know, the formatting is weird. What’s with the indentation of some lines and not others? Frankly, I don’t remember. I think I was trying to prove to myself I could write modern poetry and thought that odd formatting was the key. It’s not. The words are the key. Here’s another poem from the last page of that first Nothing Book. This is “to write a last poem” that was written on March 3rd, 1987:
to write a last poemit’s all cracked
puffed up read by myself over and over and over through and done to a crisp precise outline of my mind and the poems in there steady ready to bust like milkweed to editor á editor de editor á editor again–but…
I think that’s clear and about as sane
or poetic as I want to be ’cause the volume of work I’ve worked on is gone to death done to death by the absence of a rhyming dictionary in this limbo of bein’ unpublished
At least the formatting has settled down; except the last two lines. Again, don’t ask for meaning. I won’t bore you with poems from the beginning of the second Nothing Book because they follow shortly after the one above. Here’s one from the middle of that second volume, “LTD.” written August 16th, 1989, two years after Jeanette and I had married:
The second Nothing Book is not full. I ran out of steam or creativity or time or something I have to dredge up to be an excuse. The last poem was written on March 10th, 2005. Before that poem, I had last written a poem to my youngest daughter “a poem for abigail” on August 9th, 1999. It had occurred to me that I had also written a poem about our eldest daughter “em” on October 7th, 1990 (the date of her birth) but I had never written anything about Noah. So on March 10th, 2005, I wrote my last poem in the second Nothing Book. Here it is:
That’s the last of the output. I don’t believe I have written a poem since. I wrote a few new short stories back in 2007 to include in “Proof For Believing” but no new poems. I don’t know how to begin. It takes all my efforts to write a blahg and the creativity of a poem doesn’t come to me. Maybe I’m to close to the subject and I can’t write it anymore. I did say that IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU’RE TOO CLOSE. Maybe the opposite is true: IF YOU CAN WRITE THIS, YOU’RE FAR ENOUGH AWAY. I need to step back and look at my poetic career. I was published a few times but that was in the late 1980s when I was trying hard. I guess I just need to try harder.
I stepped away from this blahg and tried harder. Here’s what I came up with, February 25th, 2013:
How’s that for a closer?
Tags: False Ducks, Poetry, Scott Henderson, The Weepies