Derry, Northern Ireland

Derry, Northern Ireland
A book I'm working on is set in this town.

Friday, September 9, 2011

Less Huck, more "Chuck"

It's been years since I read "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" but a passage is flowing through my mind, at the moment. It's as Huck and Jim are drifting down the Mississippi on a raft in the aftermath of a flood and see a house wandering by in the middle of it. Jim explores it as best he can, since it could sink at any moment, and tells Huck it's got nothing of concern inside. (Later it turns out there was actually a dead man in the house, and as fiction would have it, this man was supposedly Huck's father...which made me frown in disbelief, at the time.)

What struck me was how Mark Twain built this image of a beautiful, silent, massive body of water whispering along and taking everything in its wake without a thought -- house, tree, man, didn't matter. The Mississippi was so completely in control, it could let itself appear to be gentle even as quick deadly currents raged underneath.

Last night I dreamed something like this -- me in the middle of water in a half-sunk boat being carried somewhere and completely unconcerned. Which is weird because I can't swim. Can barely even float and then only if I'm in water shallow enough to where I know I can touch bottom without my head having to dip below the surface. If I can't, I freak. And this is after years of swimming lessons. Maybe I drowned in a previous life.

Which segues into me wondering if Brendan can swim and how exactly did he learn if he can? My feeling is, he can't. When he's in the pool in the back of his aunt's house in Houston, he stays in the shallow end. But as I was writing that, something happened and he drove himself into the deeper part and remained underwater until his lungs were about to burst. I'm not sure why, yet. I've never seen him as suicidal or prone to making grand gestures...well, aside from getting a tattoo of Joanna's name on his left shoulder.

Only...that actually was a sort of spur-of-the-moment way of proving his love for her. I'm branding myself for you kind of thing. And other little moments have cropped up where he can be just as impetuous as his brothers and friends, even as he knows it's pointless nonsense when he's doing it.

God, I wish I knew what all of this meant, already! Just as I think I've got a clue, something happens to mess with me and my inner workings.

Of course, I could just have ADD on top of the dyslexia I exhibit when I'm typing too quickly and the general psychoses I let out of their cage when I get too deeply into my writing.

Hmph, they should have an emoticon for flipping a finger quickly over your lips with a blubbering sound.

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