Foreplay Is Not Just For Sex

Writing coaches recommend journaling or some other kind of warming up activity before writing the REAL thing. Here are five other things that need a warm-up activitiy (besides sex.)

• Warm up before taking a prescription drug. Just pop a few of anything you might find in the medicine cabinet. Then try opening that child-proof cap on the prescription bottle. This sometimes works for celebrities and sometimes not.

• Warm up before brushing teeth; prepare the gums for the assault of bristles and sweet-tasting sticky stuff. Scrape the gums (gently) with a piece of fine sandpaper and rinse with Mountain Dew.

• Warm up before mowing the lawn. Push a lawn chair up and down the yard making sure that you are making parallel indentations as it flattens the blades of grass. This warm-up may actually delay the need to mow.

• Warm up before paying your bills. Shove other paper items addressed to your creditors into the big, blue mailbox and work on your technique. (Practice power walking techniques if the mail carrier approaches.)

• Warm up before asking for a promotion. Begin by asking for more toilet paper in the ladies room (regardless of your gender); work up to asking for more knee space under your desk, and eventually ask for the boss’s job.

Alrighty then, I’m ready to write (right after I take my meds, brush my teeth, mow the lawn, pay my bills, and apply for a publisher’s job.)

Mind-Catching

I hadn't intended for my blog to become a series of "book reports", but because I've been doing more reading than writing, it seems to have come to this (at least for now.) It wasn't until I finished Mind-Catcher by John Darnton, and then went to his blog, that I realized I had read the first of his books, The Darwin Conspiracy which was, at the time, another one of my favorites (overlooking the fact that it was truly a work of fiction, hardly biographical, except that he spelled Darwin's name correctly.) I humbly forgive Darnton his license to fictionalize Darwin (and to use the word opprobrium twice in Mind-Catcher.) So, here is a review of the most recent of my "personal favs," Mind-Catcher (2003) by John Darnton.

The personal appeal of Mind-Catcher was that it is a wonderful meld of my passion for the study of the brain from an anatomical, mechanistic point of view and my interest in whatever may exist beyond the physical, what some may refer to as the supernatural. Others simply state the meld as the "mind-body" problem. (This was also referred to in the non-fiction memoir My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor.) I don't remember who said it first, but I like the explanation that the mind is what the brain does. In other words, while the miracle of who we are results from the neural connections and electro-chemical processes, we are nevertheless the miracle.

The characters of the story are both miraculously good and miraculously evil. In other words, they are human. The father of the comatose son who has been the model single parent now wallows in an alcoholic cesspool and belabors his own self-centeredness in violence as well as verbiage. The villain in the story has his compassionate moments and I reluctantly sympathized with the villain's abused childhood which left scars on his adult intellectual genius.

For me personally, I felt most strongly attracted to both the egomaniac male neurosurgeon that unwittingly set the stage for the genius villain and the compassionate, spiritual, self-aware female neurosurgeon who was willing to set aside professional conduct for doing what was right for the father and son. The neurosurgeons are two sides of the same coin and if do-overs were possible, I would do whatever I had to to become a neurosurgeon. (Maybe in the next life.) Do-overs occur in the Mind-Catcher for all but the villain whose punishment perfectly fits the crime. Do-overs and justice sound like cliche denouements but this book is a thriller from start to finish. Yes, I know the last half of that statement also sounded very cliche, but most book reports are.