Shades of Gray

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Annie Neugebauer

Originally posted on August 11, 2010 at 2:20 PM

Where does one emotion end and the next begin? Is it always shades of gray?

I’ve always battled with depression. Depression with a capital D, actually, as in Clinical Depression and not the over-used sentiment, “I feel depressed.” Depression is known to be at least partially genetic, and that holds true for me. Still, I can’t help but wonder: would I have ever gotten depressed if such horrible, tragic things hadn’t happened to me? There’s a difference between being sad because something sad happens and just always being depressed… isn’t there?

At some point, if sad things continuously happen for an extended period of time, I would have to say no. Because sadness is like a fraction of depression, as is tiredness, and if you’re exposed to that emotion for a long enough time, the brain gets used to it. The neuropathways literally get more worn for sadness than for other emotions, making it difficult if not impossible to “climb” out of those deep grooves. Genetics certainly effect depression, but it seems to me that so does life. If really sad things keep happening to a person, it would be inhuman not to be really sad about it.

The problem though, is that once a person has been severely, clinically depressed for a length of time (the length is part of what differentiates depression from grief, or sorrow), the brain can never undo the effects of that. Those grooves are worn deep, and no amount of happy living can build them back up. What this means for me is that when I get sad, I get depressed. Not the light sense of it that people toss around, which just means, “I’m currently sad and tired.” No, somehow it’s different, isn’t it? Depression is familiar, and my mind goes to it like an old friend when any related emotions pop up. Grief? Depression. Sadness? Depression. Tiredness? Depression.

So when I say, “I feel depressed,” I don’t toss the phrase around like many people do when what they really mean is they feel sad, or they are grieving. For me, it is one in the same. All shades of sad have blended to one color: dark, gray, Depression.

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In Case of Fire

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Annie Neugebauer

Originally posted on August 8, 2010 at 1:22 PM

It was sometime in the afternoon when it started to storm. It wasn’t raining, but clouds blew in and the wind picked up. Hub-a-dub and I were both sitting in the office at our laptops talking about finances when lightning/thunder (They’re the same thing, you know. They only seem different because usually it’s far enough away so that you hear and see it at different times. That day they were so near that I was forced to remember that they were one.) struck so close to our window that I screamed—one quick, girly sound before I could contain my shock. Then something in our house beeped. It sounded like the security system or smoke detector, and I initially assumed we’d lost power. But our lights were still on, so we kind of looked around and shrugged. Kyle said he thought it struck on the other side of our back fence. I thought it was between the office and the big tree.

About 10-15 minutes later, I heard the fire truck siren, but ignored it like I always do. I don’t mean to sound uncaring or jaded, but no one can have sympathy for every tragedy; you’d burn out and be unable to care for anything. It’s part of why I don’t watch the news. But soon Kyle looked outside and our entire block was filled with fire trucks, ambulances, cop cars, and the works. Our next-door neighbors’ house was struck; they weren’t grounded; the house caught fire. Their entire attic was on fire, smoke billowing out literally feet from our house. Not immediately knowing the damage and extent and danger, Kyle said, “We need to be ready to leave. I’m going to go talk to someone; you get ready to go.”

There are very few times that I feel words unable to serve me. That moment, that feeling, is one of them. I move fast in emergencies, and within probably 2 minutes I had put on shoes and my UT class ring (I was wearing my wedding ring) and gathered Buttons’ carrying crate and my zip drive with all of my writing on it. Then I was standing there in the middle of the house thinking, “What else? What else do I need to save?” I’ve thought about this scenario before, believe me, and made a mental list of things I would grab first. But in that moment, with my life’s work and my cat and my main memento of school and Dad safe, I couldn’t think of a damn thing.

“Value,” I muttered, “What has value?” but the word value made me think of money/expense, not emotional meaning, and my mind supplied the incredibly expensive business suit that I use for job interviews and stuff. Then I thought, “No, insurance will pay for that,” since I never really liked it anyway (it was the only professional suit I could find in my size). But what? What should I get? What should I save if everything goes up in flames?

Luckily, I didn’t have to think about it beyond that point, because Kyle came back in and said we were okay. They already had hoses in the house and there was no danger of it spreading to us. No one was hurt. At that point, we both went outside to watch, just like all the other neighbors did. We’ve never been overly outgoing people, especially as homeowners, and we don’t really know those neighbors. I would have liked to have gone up to them and told them I was sorry, offered a hug, and asked if they had renters insurance, but neither of us could do it. I hope they know my heart was with them and that we weren’t just out there to gawk. It was heartbreaking to think of all the things they probably lost.

As we stood out there in the light rain—the kind of rain so scattered that you feel like you could stand in it for hours and still not actually get wet—and watched the firemen work, random items kept coming to mind that I could have saved. My stack of scrapbooks. The box full of all my Dad’s mementos (because he’s dead and I couldn’t replace them). My wedding dress. Our laptops. Our insurance documents to make it easier to call. Some clothes to live off of. Because it all gets destroyed, you know. Even the things that don’t get burned are ruined from smoke and water from the fire hoses. Even now, two days later, that poor family has the guts of their home spread across their lawn and I keep thinking of things I should save if this ever really happens to us. We’re grounded, so it wouldn’t be lightning, and we have smoke detectors connected to our security company, so help would come fast, but something like this doesn’t just go away. You can’t “tune out” tragedies that are literally next door. It’s like a new handful of sorrow and worry in the back of my mind. What would I save from a fire?

What would you save?

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As if from Nowhere

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Annie Neugebauer

Originally posted on August 3, 2010 at 4:10 PM

When we were on vacation, I got an idea for my next novel. It takes place in Lake City and is a horror novel, and that’s pretty much all I’m willing to tell you at this point. So as you can imagine, walking and driving around Lake City for a full week, I was continuously inspired by things to add to my plot, characters to create, and nice details to fill things out. I tried to relax and just enjoy being there, but I don’t work that way. When my writing brain gets an idea, I will be thinking about it on the back burner (or front, if I’m IN the situation like that) until it’s written down. There was no use fighting it; I was, essentially, working on vacation.

That’s part of the creative artist’s blessing and curse, I think. At first I thought I was just doing that because for the past few years, I’ve made writing my priority, which means I’ve trained my mind to actively look for inspiration. Especially since I regularly write new poems, I’ve become pretty in-tune with things that catch my fancy. But when I really thought about it, I realized that that wasn’t actually the reason I couldn’t get my mind off of the new novel idea. I’ve been creating fiction from vacations since I was a little girl.

In fact, the first time we ever went to Lake City as a family, back in 1997, we stayed in a cabin for a week during the summer. My brother and I shared a room with two beds, and in the closet of that room was the crawl space access. Now, being from Texas, we’d never even heard of a crawl space before. So when we discovered a “secret” door in the floor that led under the house, I was immediately inspired. I concocted a whole storyline—which I appropriately dubbed, The Vacation from Hell—in which a vacationer is locked in the underground crawl space and left to starve. I even wrote out a note that ended in shaky, fading letters saying, “But it’s been two weeks now without food, and I can’t… go… on… much…” I begged my parents to let me leave the note partway sticking out the door for the next vacationers to find, but I think they said no. I was ten, and already trying to write novels, regardless of my lack of follow-through.

Likewise, in our family trip to San Francisco (I don’t know how old I would have been), I plotted a horror novel I was calling The Muffin Man, about a serial killer, Trevor McVille, dubbed “The Muffin Man” who, literally, lived on Drury Lane. He left half-eaten muffins at each of his victim’s bodies as a clue for police. The idea was ridiculous, of course, but the first “chapter” that I actually did get around to writing was surprisingly good. This was maybe in middle school. I think I was into reading Mary Higgins Clark at the time.

Around that same time I came up with another idea that was poorly written, but inspired me as an adult to write a piece of flash fiction that I absolutely love—”She Sleeps.” And now that same concept has become a poem in my Around Dark Corners collection. Although most of the other early “novel” fragments were less useful, it does show that I’ve always been working on fiction plots in my head, and typically on vacation. What does this mean? I don’t know if I believe that some people are really, truly “born to do” something with their lives, but if so, it certainly seems I was meant to do this.

The new novel idea is better than The Muffin Man, I promise.

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Leave no trace… or else.

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Annie Neugebauer

Originally posted on July 25, 2010 at 4:30 PM

I’m calling you out, jerk. That’s right. You know who you are. I hope your face is burning with disgrace.

What kind of person goes into the wilderness and harms it? I would like to know why someone would make a campfire and then throw glass bottles into it, shattering them into tiny pieces that stick in the earth’s soil like a thorn in the soft paw of a wild fox? Why bother traveling hundreds maybe thousands of miles to get away from other humans and then leave trash behind? Have you no respect? Have you no shame? These people disgust me.

Nothing in this world makes me quite as furious as intentional littering. Lazy littering. It is one of the only things—one of the only groups of people—that I would honestly say I hate. I hate litterbugs.

The first night we arrived, we drove to the top of a mountain to camp. Being well-learned and well-intended, we found a previously created campsite in wonderful seclusion nestled in the sky-scraping pines of the Uncompahgre wilderness. What at first glance we saw as a beautiful campsite soon revealed itself as scarred. Hunters, based on the bullet casings littering the earth, had camped there previously and left their mark. Although someone before them had already picked a fine place for a campfire, they chose to make not one, but two new—and HUGE—campfire rings. This is a no no.

Not only that, but they threw trash into their fire that could not burn. Beer bottles & caps, aluminum cans, random metal things, and more. And around the rest of the campsite, they scattered such lovely human remains as Monistat boxes, anti-diarrheal pills still in the individually-wrapped packages, tent stakes, remains of tarps, shoe laces, rope, more broken glass, screws, plastic, and so much more. Also, they had dragged enormous tree-trunks into a pile in the middle of the ground and left them there.

Did you know that a single cigarette butt can remain for 25 years? That it takes a million years for a glass bottle to decompose? That plastic will NEVER break down?

Of course, we cleaned it all up as much as we could. But there were tiny pieces of glass that we couldn’t fish from the ashes, and certainly other items had already worked down into the dirt. Haven’t they ever heard, “Take only pictures; leave only footprints”? Didn’t their mother ever tell them, “Leave your campsite cleaner than you found it”? These people didn’t even try. They didn’t give a shit. It makes me so mad I tear up. Why? Why do they not care?

This is perhaps a negative way to start the blogs about our rather wonderful vacation, but if you were to go to this place, if you were to witness the awe and beauty of a land so wild and lovely that it makes your heart ache, you would be protective, too. Lake City and the surrounding San Juan Mountains are my favorite place in the entire world. It is perfection where nature meets people. It is the best vacation spot I’ve ever been to, and I’ve been blessed enough to see some amazing places (Ireland, Italy, Germany, Hawaii, Austria, Paris, Amsterdam, Mexico, the Bahamas, California, Oregon, Louisiana…;), and I want it to stay that way. I want my children to be able to enjoy it, too. So take the minimal effort to throw your bottles in the trash, asshole. And so help me God, if I see you toss a cigarette butt out the window, you can bet your butt I’m calling the cops on your license plate.

So educate yourself, bitches.

Happier vacation blogs to come.

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What IS Publication?

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Annie Neugebauer

Originally posted on July 15, 2010 at 9:12 PM

I have recently been intertwined in a debate over what, exactly, constitutes publication. I won’t bore you with the exact details of the scenario. To sum up: I won first place in a national poetry contest. The poem I won it with had been previously used in the Merging Visions Exhibit that DPA participates in every year. This exhibit displays artwork and poetry as pairings on the wall of the public libraries. Some people outside of DPA–whose understanding as a group was that the exhibit did NOT count as publication—took issue with this. They said that the exhibit counted as publication and that I should be disqualified as winner because of it.

Well! Happy ending is that I get to keep my 1st place spot. *hooray* But the committees for two different poetry organizations now have to specifically define and pin down their definition of “published.” So, it got me thinking: what makes publication publication? Here are the rules, word for word, from the above-mentioned contest guidelines:

“Any poem submitted must be the original work of the contestant, unpublished in any form, including electronically, not under consideration or accepted for publication. (Award will be recalled if a winning poem is found to be in violation of rules before publication in the NFSPS anthology of prize poems, and lower prizes and honorable mentions will move up in classification.)”

So, is hanging a single copy of a poem on a wall in a public library “publication”? The term means different things to different people. On the one hand, the root word of publication is public, from the Latin publicus, akin to Latin populous: people. So you might argue that anything that has been put in front of the public (the general people) has been published. So if I leave my diary open for anyone to look at in the middle of Walmart, it has been published? Really? Can I list that on my writer’s bio? “Publication credits include my personal diary, 2010.”

Well, no. Because obviously, there is a breakdown somewhere between what constitutes something just being viewed and something being published. Root words are just that: roots. Time changes meaning; little trees grown into vast ones, or big trees get struck by lightning to get split and branched into new directions entirely. So what is published now?

My argument is that to be “published,” something must be intentionally put before the general populous with the intent to be distributed. That’s the key: distributed. A book is “published” because someone can buy a copy and take it home. A newsletter is published because it is mailed out to people and they can retain it. A website is published because (it is intended that) people can print it out, email it, and generally share it. An oral reading isn’t published, because the audience can’t reread it later. A poem hung—as a single copy—on a wall in a public library is not published, because the viewers cannot keep a copy, take it home, or send it to anyone. Catch my drift?

Now I’m ’bout to click “Publish Post” on this blog, and I’ll agree with that. Hup! That goes on the resume… 😉

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