It’s Christmas Eve - Eve - Eve - Eve - Eve -Eve - Eve - Eve - Eve - Eve!
Not so collectible Issue 2 — Becoming Super Rog!
12/15/2024
Prepare to be amused (or annoyed; your choice)!
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Merry Christmas! – Wait, No? Happy Holidays! (Better?)
In last month’s episode: We considered the joys and joys of being wrong and my deep, vast, in-depth work on my shitty first draft.
In this month’s episode, more about shit while we wonder:
Can Super Rog Handle The Truth?
The Book of Knowledge taught me much:
How to tell time.
How to make marionettes (or “play with dolls,” as my Dad called it).
How to build kites I flew high and far over the farm – and beyond.
And The Truth About Santa Claus.
I suffered many earaches as a kid. One day I had to stay home and miss a family trip to I know not where (most of you know I spend my time “I know not where”). My older sister, Nancy, was tasked with staying home to care for me.
I was about to start school in the first grade (we had no kindergarten). My parents decreed that was the appropriate time for their kids to learn about Santa Claus. I could barely hear my Mom and sister whispering, and after everyone else left, Nancy sashayed into my parents’ bedroom (earache treatment for some unknown reason involved lying in my parents’ bed), smiling and carrying a volume of The Book of Knowledge.”
“May I read you a story?” Nancy asked.
I never said no to a story. But what she read wasn’t a story.
It was an essay, an article, the Truth. It explained Santa Claus was a fiction; a character who personified kindness, goodwill, generosity, and cheer. He was not a real person, he was a spirit of love, a benevolent ghost.
Nancy finished, closed the book around her finger, and asked, “Do you understand?”
I did! “Ghosts are real!”
“Let me read it again. Now, listen very closely.”
The second time through, I got it.
Mind blown. Christmas – Past, Present, Future – altered. Forever.
A single idea changed everything, everywhere, backwards and forwards.
I peppered Nancy with questions. She answered every one.
I rested. Earache pain faded, overwhelmed by the clangor of stupendous wisdom born from this new, sensational, simple Truth.
Beliefs, notions, ideas all rearranged themselves, spinning, revolving, pirouetting, prancing and dancing like sugar plum visions, pairing, separating, stomping, romping, falling back to my original views only to reel around again to the recently revealed Truth.
It was sad. It was challenging. It was the loss of a beloved belief.
It was exhilarating.
Reality was simultaneously torn asunder and reintegrated with revitalized wisdom leading – I knew not where.
I loved it.
Onward!
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You Call That Progress?
First Things First
In addition to exposing “The Truth About Santa Claus,” The Book of Knowledge quoted a Great Philosopher: as Alice (In Wonderland) stands outside the Duchess’s house she asks, “How am I to get in?”
A Great Philosopher answers: “Are you to get in at all? … That’s the first question, you know.”
That Great Philosopher was a footman. And a frog.
His logic – Irrefutable.
I struggled as a reader. But Lewis Carroll’s pun- and humor-laced logic coupled with John Tenniel’s pen and ink drawings reproduced as woodcuts (I’ve always experienced difficulty visualizing characters from written descriptions) delighted me. I love silly. I love nonsense. I love twists.
My writing style is classified as “Pantser” – meaning someone who writes with no outline, no plan, no idea where they are headed.
Just like my driving (thank the gods for GPS); I don’t GET lost; lost is where I start.
In college, I pulled all-nighters typing my papers. After 12 hours rambling out how many ever required pages, I would write a “conclusion,” then realize, “NOW I know what I should have written.”
At my present advanced age, I’m much more disciplined, not to mention incapable of staying awake past 7:30. P.M.
But no more organized.
Until The Sellable Book Inner Circle, my writing group.
There I spent months planning, charting, listing, rearranging, redrafting, altering, discarding, improving (hopefully), regrouping, rethinking, replanning.
The idea being to build the structure first, THEN write out the parts.
Weird.
It hasn’t been easy, it hasn’t been clear, it hasn’t been tidy – but it has been educational.
What I got was NOT a “finished product,” but rather a “work in progress” scheme, plan, framework for drafting the essays in Becoming Super Rog!
In the inspiring words of another Great Philosopher: “I don’t know where I am going, but I am on my way.” My motto.
This time not a Frog, but some guy named Voltaire.
And so I have started over. Creating a new structure. Relating Super Rog from his initial antics to – well, we’ll see.
Of course, I hope I’m on the right track (at last), but there are no guarantees.
“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”
Also Voltaire. Turns out Voltaire said a LOT of really cool things.
And so, I continue. “On my way.”
Welcome aboard!
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