Camino de Santiago

Recently, I embarked on an adventure.  I hiked 200 miles of the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage that has been journeyed since ancient times.  If you want to research it a bit, American Pilgrims on the Camino is a good place to start.  It starts in France and continues throughout Spain, and ends at Santiago de Compostela, where the Cathedral de Compostela is [the supposed resting place of St. James].

It was incredible.

The Dance

I wrote this last semester during one of my classes.

THE DANCE

Copyright Reagan Dyer 2014

A mash of mixed up words

all the music coming strong and fast,

the pain thick on my tongue.

But on and on we dance.

The world is all become red

with white-hot flashing lights.

The voices have become a blur

that spill out in the night.

I want to say something,

but the words die on my lips.

Do I deserve this thing?

The world begins to tip.

A nightly tradition we carry out,

spinning round and round again.

The tune beats inside my head,

each note a throb of pain.

But while the music carries on,

I know I have no chance

to duck his flying, bloody fist
before we break this deadly dance.

Bulletin Stories: War is Hell

Like I mentioned in my previous post, I have various pictures tacked up on my bulletin board and I have written something about each one.

-R.D.

"I want to kiss him.  I want to kiss his mouth and make him forget––forget everything he has seen; every horror he has witnessed; every injury he has sustained.  Every person he has killed.  For a couple seconds, I want to kiss him, hard, and then I want to lose myself in those eyes."

Update

I am not a very good blogger.  At all.

I justify myself by saying that I am a better college student, but I'm not sure if that's true.  Anyway I have been trying to write [mostly in The Lightcatcher, but I have new idea as well], which hasn't been all that successful.  So I have started tacking up random pictures on my bulletin board in my dorm room.  Underneath each of these, I have written a sentence or several just about the picture in general.

It is a way for me to be creative without committing to a lot of work, and it has been wonderful.  So I think I'm going to start putting them up here for y'all to see as well.

-R.D.

Theatre Monologues

For one of my classes this semester [Intro to Theatre] we were given the assignment of choosing a picture [one of the few that our professor sent us] and coming up with a backstory for that character.

Then we were supposed to write a short monologue for that particular person and present it to the class.

This was the picture I chose, and here is the monologue I wrote for my character:

After that day, I picked roses in her memory.  She loved them, you know.  So much.  She loved a lot of things, you could say.  She used to wear this perfume, see, that smelled like—I don’t know, like, sunshine—I guess.  Yeah, like sunshine—and light, and flowers, and her.  I don’t know what it was called.  She never told me.  I never smelled it on any other woman.  Just her.

She loved bright colors, too, and I used to paint her in my brightest shades, all green and pink and blue and yellow in her floral print dresses and cherry lipstick.  That’s another thing; flowers.  She adored flowers.  I made it a point to surprise her whenever I could with a bouquet, just to see her smile.  That smile was like cold water being poured down my back, or breathing in the scent of sun-warm strawberries—exhilarating and sweet and beautiful, all at the same time. 

As I painted her upon my blank canvases in splashes of vibrant color, she slowly painted herself on my heart.

The world wouldn’t miss me the way it misses her…  I miss her.  It should have been me.

Of all the things she loved, though, she liked roses most of all.  I remember that.  So every day since…since then, I’ve gone down Barker to where the wild roses twine through the dilapidated fence.  When they’re in bloom, I pick some for Robbie.

Peach-colored ones.

Not one of the best things I have ever written, I'll grant. But it was a fun assignment.

Cheers.

-RAD

Defiance

I just watched this movie again last night, and it is one of my favorite movies of all time.  Dark, horrific, and full of language, but one of my favorites.

It's also based on a true story.

It's about the Bielski brothers, jews, fighters, leaders.  Hunted.  IMDb summarizes: "Jewish brothers in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe escape into the Belarussian forests, where they join Russian resistance fighters and endeavor to build a village in order to protect themselves and about 1,000 Jewish non-combatants."

During the fall of 1941, Tuvia, Zus, Asael, and Aron Bielski escape into the forest, running from those who slaughtered their parents.  Other jews flee there as well, and soon Tuvia takes over, providing a home and food for these refugees.  It becomes a camp of desperate jews, all working together to make a home, a community.

They are trained to fight, even the women.  Moving from place to place, as the Germans discover their whereabouts, they try and succeed and suffer together.

The movie chronicles the Bielski brothers' struggles to provide as more and more jews pour into the forest in search of the fabled Bielski Otriad.  They join forces with Russian freedom fighters, and the group splits up as frictions between the two older brothers (Tuvia and Zus) come to light.

The crux of the movie, for me, is when a German soldier the fighters have captured is brought into the Bielski camp.  Tuvia has stated how they (the jews) are not animals, however they might be hunted like them.  But when the soldier is brought before a group of angry refugees, they start crying obscenities at him, blaming him for everything they have suffered.

One woman starts screaming about her son, how he had blue eyes and was fifteen, and then brings the butt of her rifle down upon the German soldier.  Everyone else starts crying out about their dead brother or sister or parents, all the while hitting the soldier who is now on the ground.

The angry group beats him to death.

And all the while, Tuvia stands there, letting them have their vengeance.  But his face is sad.  

The irony of this scene just strikes me right in the gut.

Defiance is one of the best movies, in my opinion, ever.  It conveys a message, portrays evil and suffering, grim determination and grit, and shows how hope can keep a person alive.  A true, incredible story.

One of my all-time favorite quotes is when Tuvia Bielski says, "If we should die, trying to live, then at least we died like human beings."

Chills all over.

Great Insults

I love a good comeback.  However, I am eternally saddened by the fact that I rarely contain enough wit to make one myself.

I admire people who are able to accomplish this feat.  I don't mean just being plain sarcastic in a rude way, but people who actually possess the mental capabilities to think of clever retorts.

So here is a collection of my favorite insults [that just sounds wrong...]:

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends..." -Oscar Wilde.

"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here." -Stephen Bishop.

"I've just heard about his illness.  Let's hope it's nothing trivial." -Irvin S. Cobb.

"He loves nature in spite of what it did to him." -Forrest Tucker.

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening.  But this wasn't it." -Groucho Marx.

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." -Winston Churchill.

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." -Mark Twain.

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" -Mark Twain.

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." -Oscar Wilde.

"He has Van Gogh's ear for music." -Billy Wilder.

"He had delusions of adequacy." -Walter Kerr.

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my play; bring a friend, if you have one." -George Bernard Shaw (to Winston Churchill).

RESPONSE:

Winston Churchill: "Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second...if there is one."

Brilliance.  Pure brilliance.

-R.D.