Thinking on the Life of Lars Larce.

There is a Spanish idiom that goes, “Thinking on the immortality of a crab” and I only learned about it recently, but it has become one of my favorite phrases. It relates to daydreaming and it is a funny way of saying, “I’m not doing nothing, I’m actually deep in contemplation.”

So the usage would be like this:

INT. DAY. LIVING ROOM.

RINALDO is staring passively out a window. Enter MARIA.

MARIA: Rinaldo! You lazy bum! Why are you just sitting there while I am making dinner for the kids?

RINALDO: I’m actually thinking on the immortality of a crab.

MARIA: Well why don’t you do that while you set the table?

RINALDO: Yes, Maria.

MARIA: My mother was right about you.

And scene!

Now, whatever marriage problems Maria and Rinaldo might have are not the topic of this blog post. I am mostly concerned now about daydreaming.

I have spent enough of my life engaged in creative endeavors that I recognize how essential it is to daydream, to ponder and to simply let the mind wander. I’ve had trouble with it the last year or two though and I really do think that it is because of podcasts. 

That seems like a leap, but hear me out. The explosion of podcasts has made it so that whatever your niche interests, you can find a podcast. For instance, the inimitable Glen Weldon of NPR now has a podcast called A Degree Absolute that goes episode by episode through the 1960 British TV show The Prisoner which is the single most insane television program that has ever been produced. And listening to the podcast is absolutely delightful and I love it because it was clearly made for me and like the four other people in existence who would like to see David Lynch make a James Bond movie.

The problem is that my podcast consumption has been increasing substantially over the years and there are some days when I basically don’t even take my earbuds out. There is just SO MUCH information out there to consume! And some of it is good. It is not all bubblegum that I’m listening to. I listen to several daily news pods and numerous wonky policy pods and shows on minimalism and stoicism and history and all kinds of other smart and fancy stuff like that. 

But what I’m not doing much lately is thinking on the immortality of a crab.

Last night I was in bed trying to go to sleep and a name came to me. This is not a terribly unusual thing for a writer and I like odd names, I even keep a list of them. So even though I was warm and comfy under my blankets, I had to roll over and reach for my phone in the dark and that is why this morning I have an email from myself that just says, “Lars Larce”. Now I don’t know who Lars Larce is or what I’m going to do with his name, but at least it did not leave me in the middle of the night, which would have happened otherwise.

As I settled back into bed last night, I realized it had been a long time since I’d had to do that. This was my first Lars Larce in a long time. That makes me sad because when the creative process is really kicking, you are getting Lars Larces all the damn time. A productive writer lives a life drowning in post-it notes that say things like: “The feather is GREEN” or “the roof of the arboretum needs cleaned and so it’s gloomy when they meet.” Stuff like that is common.

But you can’t realize that the roof of the arboretum needs cleaned if you’re not letting your mind wander around in there. You can’t find your way around the arboretum if you’re focused on Glen Weldon talking about the state of BBC Four in 1967. 

I need to find a way to cram more non-time into my life. I need to spend more time thinking on the immortality of a crab. I need to open up some space for more Lars Larces in my life. After all, who is he meeting at the arboretum? Why there? And what’s with the feather? I’m never going to figure it out unless I find some time to.

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On Petards and My Imbalanced Work Life.

I don’t write about my professional work life on here. I will allude to it occasionally because I am proud of it and because it takes up at least a third of my normal day, but if I am going to continue to insist that working professional people can ALSO have public creative lives, I need to respect the boundary between those two things just as I think that employers should do.

That being said, are you familiar with the phrase “gird one’s loins”? It means to prepare for something difficult. I have a lot of difficult work to do over the next couple of weeks and I’d hoped it would not come to the point where I have to rev up into high gear, but alas, I am really going to need to knock it out quickly and in quantity.

You wouldn’t know this, but I just had to do this over the holiday break. I was hoping to not have to do it again, but here we are. So this phrase “grid your loins” has been on my mind the past couple of days. So I looked it up and the derivation is kind of unclear. It wasn’t that I couldn’t find a source, I actually found so many that they all called one another into question. Apparently in this phrase “loins” does not refer to genitals, though I’m not sure how that is the case. As far as I can tell,  the phrase basically means to put on a belt … I guess. The idea being that in good old biblical times, people wore clothes that were more flowing and so if you had to move around a lot, you didn’t want your clothes flapping in the way and so you would put on a belt.

That still seems kind of genital-related to me … or perhaps “loins” used to more refer to an area of the body? Like when we say “stomach” we can mean the organ that digests food or the lower middle section of one’s body … I don’t know. I don’t have the time to do a lot of research on this because I try to write one of these each morning and so what these blogs lack in quality at least they make up for in being uninformed!

You know what is another fun idiom???

“Hoisted by your own petard.”

There is a great joke about this on the show Community when Jeff asks Britta what she thinks a “petard” is and she says that it is like a leotard, which I think is what we all kind of think. Like getting hoisted by your own petard means some schoolyard bullies hooked your 80s workout leotard to a flagpole and hoisted you on up.

Well that is not the case!

A “petard” was a kind of medieval explosive used in warfare and “hoist” still meant “lift” but in this case it means to lift by way of explosion. So to be “hoisted by your own petard” actually means “blown up by your own bomb” and that might be just as good of a way to describe my next few weeks as the “girding” thing.

Anyway, I will try to avoid it, but I may not get to write here every morning for the duration of these next couple of weeks, but I will do my best. Though I am kind of tired of doing my best all the time. It is exhausting! I would really like to be able to just do my most C+ all the time and have that be okay.

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