Occupying November

I intended to write a book this month. I started with the fever of Nanowrimo and had my prerequisite gungho determination to crank out a couple thousand words a day. I’ve done it the last two years. I figured two or three kickass Saturdays of 10k and I’d be all set. Vomit out the first draft and I’d be back in the writing swing.

I haven’t looked at my manuscript since November 3rd. Maybe I’m making excuses for being a lackluster writer in that, in this blog, in the devotion to selling my novel. But I have a long, draining commute. I already started some of those long draining days of work for April’s bigtodo. And… I really don’t like the idea that I started.

I do. But I don’t. Because… the world is changing. I am changing with it.  

In the wake of the Wall Street arrests yesterday, I saw a few posts on the voyeur network both for and against. The against is a tired argument that there is no message – that everyone who participates are a bunch of lazy, entitled hypocrites. Hm. Maybe. In some respects. No more lazy, entitled, or hypocritical than most Americans. But I can shift my eyes for a minute and see a point. I don’t register it with agreement… because you know what, this occupy movement has set up camp in my outlook on the world.

I’m not going to camp. I never make it to a general assembly because I’m usually sitting in the parking lot of the Pike when they occur. I want to bake cookies and drop them off at some point… but I always find some other thing of more consequence to my immediate moment. But I still think about and discuss and appreciate the messages I see on handwritten pieces of cardboard. They are important. They are changing the world. They are changing me.

But let’s get back to that book. I wrote about my inspiration of a superhero. I was so jazzed… but first I thought the formula was too much like An Ever Fixed Mark. And then… I started really thinking about what it means to be a hero. And why we are so fixed upon waiting for one to save us. A rich, unrealistically strong, magical man to rescue us from the baddies. Why are we waiting? Some of us aren’t. Some people are setting up camp and saying it’s time for us to save ourselves.

Maybe that’s just an excuse to make my negligence seem noble. I’m not actually doing anything right now. I’m just dreaming up schemes and possibilities. But… schemes and possibilities of things that weren’t a shadow on my horizon six months ago. I still want to write. I still want to do things theatrical. But… I’m starting to think the act of that doesn’t have to be a mutually exclusive purpose from what is happening here.

And there is lots happening. So much more than I can articulate in another few paragraphs. And maybe this is a self-indulgent way of participating in a movement that is sooo much larger than myself. But… if we don’t see ourselves in this movement and how it can change what we do in a way beyond setting up a tent and standing in assembly, then it becomes all too easy to decide the ones who do are hypocritical sloths.

But they aren’t. They are changing the world. And that’s where I will join them.