Welcome to poetic reflection week 4...let's meet a fabulous blogger/poet/writer/cartoonist A. B. Thomas...He has been an authentic fan to Jingle Poetry Community, and his poetry touches a wide range of topics, his cartoon creations are always funny and witty, he also writes short stories, his reflections on writing and blogging are very inspiring, honest, and beautiful.
Tell us about yourself.
If you were to ask my boys’ former principal and school board, my mother, and my mother-in-law I am the ultimate embodiment of all that’s evil in the world. Ask the company’s general manager, salesman, and most of the crew, I am the most arrogant know it all who happens to fluke out and be right 99% of the time. Ask most of the women I’ve dated they’d say that I must be the biggest camping enthusiast in the world because I am always trying to pitch a tent. My friends would say that I’m a guy who really should be wearing pants more often. Me, I’d describe myself as just an ordinary cat cruising along life who just happens to like writing and doodling.
Tell me about your blog, the name, what does it mean to you?
Mutter Fluka, other than sounding much like an iconic slur used in describing me in many situations (though if one were to factor in my age and the latest teen pregnancy figures I could away with putting “grand” in front as well) does have some meaning. FLUKA (Fluktuierende KAskade) is a software simulation meant to calculate mathematical probability and theoretical derivations of particles with an indeterminist algorithm, or in other words, a mathematical“yeah but if” based on a scientific formula to factor in chaos. Mutter is speaking in such a way that those around you cannot with 100% certainty identify the content, tone or context of those words. Put the two together and you have the concept that anything can make sense as long as you mutter it low enough that people, not being able to make out most of the syllables, will fill in the blanks based on their assumptions to reach the conclusion that I have to be making sense when the reality is that I’m the guy pantless on the corner arguing with a street light over who’s going to get out of the way.
When have you started blogging?
I started blogging back at the end of 2005 when I was working on the road a lot more than I do now, more as a cheaper method of rambling to a couple of friends rather than phone calls. Initially I did not consider it as a forum of creativity that folks who didn’t know me would have any interest in but I guess the idea of looking at the carnage of an accident has a broad appeal.
Your first poem? Remember?
My first poem – yikes, a nightmarish scenario. My first official poem would have been written when I was eleven, after the winter had ceded the ice rink to our swimming hole. A group of us had gone down to take a swim. There’s something magical about cold water and what it does to a person’s body, though negative on the male anatomy, a bonus for the female anatomy. The summer before she was naught but a flat prairie, but somehow the parka Debbie had worn over those cold months had fertilized her chest to blossom like the stink weed we walked through to get to the swimming hole. Debbie was far more sophisticated than the other girls, after all, her dad was a lawyer so I knew that the only way I was going to be doing any harvesting in her fields, I’d have to get quite classy, so to woo her, I wrote her a poem about how she made me feel. Unfortunately I had listened to my cousin, at the elderly age of sixteen was wise to the world, who told me that what women wanted from a man is to be flat out honest. So honest and descriptive I was. Debbie’s mom, who intercepted my luv prose, was not impressed, nor was her father, who rather than handling the situation in a sophisticated manner, impressed upon me that if anything that I written were to come to light, a certain part of my body would be tacked on the barn door for the cats to bat around.
What are your writing inspirations?
It would be much easier to name some things that don’t inspire me. Awake or asleep, there’s something always unique in the experience that urges me to write out something. Heck, once when I was building a door I wrote the steps out in prose.
When did you start writing poetry? Do you write fiction as well?
I write all sorts of things, depending on my whim. I have written articles for Subversify Magazine on the practice of bride burning in India, the lack of ethics within the local school board, the issue of horse meat, homelessness, but then have written short stories and knocked out a few “Dr. Phal” cartoons to boot.
Do you have a favorite author or poet?
Hands down, Lord Byron.
Favorite quote?
One night Bessie Braddock said to Sir Winston Churchill, “Sir, you are drunk.” Churchill replied, “Madam, you are ugly. In the morning, I shall be sober.”
It may sound like a cruel sort of quote to be comforted by but in a round-about way it shows the depth of Churchill or that I have had far too much time to over analyze a quip. All my life I have never been content with anyone saying, “because that’s just the way it is” so “you just have to suck it up and go with it” – I will not let myself believe that there is anything in the world that is not dynamic in nature; change is necessary to grow. I take Mrs. Braddock as the “WE” or “THEY” of society and Churchill as the what could be.
Any advice to poets who wish to blog or write poetry?
Look at your blog like sex – if you’re doing it all for someone else then you are denying yourself the pleasure that it should bring. Don’t be afraid to experiment, find out what you like and if there are others who enjoy it, all the better, The space you use is your stage, the spot light is on you, bring out your best.
what's your plan for your future writing?
It’s hard to say at the moment, there are so many ideas floating around in my head that it’s hard to pick just one. Ideally I would love a publisher to say “here, we love your stuff so we’re going to throw this wad of cash at you”, but with a virtual mountain of rejection letters over the past couple of years, I know that is not going to happen. It would be interesting to go the self publishing route but if I were to spend that kind of money, I would rather do it with my three boys doing something that we’d all enjoy – until the sugar rush they’d all be on for x amount of days finally crashed and for a week they’d go through withdrawals and I’d end up with some sort of hallucinogenic addiction to escape. The only reasonable course of action is to write when I can on what I want and be satisfied with that.
Please feel free to read A. B. Thomas here: http://abthomas.wordpress.com/
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