Writing The Wave-Chapter 2

Sounds I hear in 3 minutes

• Dishwasher motor spraying water inside
• Floor creak
• Motorcycle outside
• Iphone ping
• Tv. Music and dialogue and industrial sounds
• Refrigerator humming
• Stomach noises
• Fan blowing AC
• Hands tapping on leather recliner
• Hands across whiskers
• Outside leaf blower
• Street racers?
• Timer on iPad goes off
• water draining into sink

Select 4 sounds from the above list. For each of the 4 sounds, select 3 additional ways to describe it

Outside leaf blower

• Backwards running vacuum cleaner
• 2 cycle decibel creator
• Handheld atmospheric carbon generator

Stomach noises

• Sounds of digestion? Maybe sounds of hunger
• Potentially embarrassing personal sounds
• “What was that”?

Floor creak

• The ghosts are active again
• Was that an earthquake?
• Just an old house settling in for a few more years

Fan blowing AC

• Sending hot air outside where it belongs
• What is the opposite of refrigerant? Heatant?
• Wearing a sweatshirt inside in the summer

For your 4 favorite sounds above, out each in the box of a quadrant. Not sure how to do that here, so I’ll make 4 separate text boxes. Later on, in each box I’ll put the name of a color.

The ghosts are active again. White

Handheld atmospheric carbon generator. Black

What is the opposite of refrigerant? Heatant? Red

Potentially embarrassing personal sounds. Gray

Each of these sound and color combinations is a bridge. I now need to, spend about 5 minutes explaining how these two ideas are related.

• Floor creak-White. Part of me thinks that this is an arbitrary combination but try this. Imagine a freshly polished wood floor. Every step you take makes the floor creak, and leaves a lighter imprint of your shoe in the floor. How is it lighter? It’s a mix of the original floor floor and white.
• And of course, ghosts are white. Duh.

• Leaf blower-black. When I see a leaf blower I imagine black smoke or soot emitting from the engine. Carbon is black. Again. Easy. And literal.

• Fan blowing AC-red. We often associate warmth, or high temperatures, with the color red. So, a fan blowing AC is removing hot, red air from the room.

• Stomach noises-gray. I’ve never seen the inside of my stomach. I e seen pre eaten food. I’ve seen completely dingested food (or what is left of it). As food transitions through these processes it must be gray at some point. I’ve had a chef friend tell me that all British food is gray. Which isn’t my experience. I’m not exactly sure what point I was trying to make.

For the next exercise we go back to the original four boxes. You might recall that these are the 4 favorite sounds. Here they are again.

• Outside Leaf Blower
• Stomach Noises
• Floor Creak
• Fan Blowing AC

With each of these I’ll be adding some dimensions. A taste, a personal memory, country or state name, person, height and weight of the person, occupation of that person, and a secret of that person.

What? Where is this going? Let’s begin.

Next I’m supposed to set my timer for 10 minutes. Take two of the bolded items above, and mush them together.

I’ll select Fan Blowing AC and Floor Creak. Here goes.

Marie was our neighbor during the 7 years that we lived in the little ranch style house. At the time we didn’t know it was little. But it was. With Cajun ancestry, she looked like a South Louisana native. And she was. Her 2 favorite food groups were crawfish and beer. That’s all of the proof that you need right there.

Her neighbor had recently moved there from Virginia. His family law business in Culpepper had collapsed (because there isn’t much law there, and “family” is a bit of an ambiguous word) so he moved South to start a new life. He wasn’t exactly sure what he would DO, however. Outside of law, his choices were limited. He could work in the local oil refinery. Or perhaps as a deckhand on a river boat, or even as a flag man with the local highway construction crews. One thing is sure, however. He knew nothing about Louisiana Law, except that it was descended from the Napoleonic Code. Whatever that means.

So, what did they have in common? DC is built from a swamp. South Louisiana is a swamp. Humidity is common to both areas, although the humid season is shorter in Virginia. They both loved spicy food, but for different reasons. Would their love of spice turn into a spicy tryst? Or would it be more like the Spice in Frank Herberts Dune?

Here’s 5 things I like about the piece.

• The short description of Marie using the words crawfish and berr
• The way that life experiences and memories weave their way into the writing, without really trying
• I’ve never been to Culpepper. Where is that come from?
• I never would have imagined that a live of spicy food could join two characters
• 10 minutes flew by,

Onto Chapter 3.