I have been writing daily, just not posting. I’d love to say it’s because what I’ve been writing is so deeply personal I’m afraid to share, or so fucking good I’m afraid to get ripped off. Yeah, no. It’s a little weird but I’ll start something and the phone will ring, and yes, I’ve sworn at the phone but I’ll pick it up. Nothing inspired gets interrupted by a phone call, not the phones fault not the callers. It was stuff that was born to be interrupted.
I’ve been here three years and I’m just as lost as when I got here. It’s not like one grand gesture and I crawl from the muck into the light; well, perhaps it’s exactly like that, but I haven’t a clue what that gesture would be. And there’s the shit like the construction of that last sentence. I think I’ve typed perhaps and maybe more times in the past three years than the past three decades. Hmmm, poor statement, grammatically and mathematically. The past three years are included in the past three decades, but you know what I mean. I don’t think it’s an impossiblely high standard for me to write a god damned sentence that doesn’t need help from the reader to make sense.
At the risk of writing some sort of who-the-fuck-cares auto-biography of process I’m going to write some sort of who-the-fuck-cares auto-biography of process, but will try to keep that piece short and focused.
A few entries back I wrote about winning some Read Magazine thing in grade school. My years hitchhiking I didn’t always carry a pair of dry socks, but I had at least two pens, a pencil and two journals. It’s possible someone tells his grandchildren of how he saw a hitchhiker on the side of the road by a field of sunflowers whittled a small pencil with a bowie knife. That was probably me. It wasn’t a bowie knife, but it was the size and weight of one. It was for whittling, pencil shaving, gutting fish and scaring scarey motherfuckers. I was always amazed at how often this bit of small talk came up “You know if you pulled that thing on me you’d best be prepared to use it.” I usually just smiled. The few times I did pull on a person they just backed off.
I wrote during my college years and my years as a young parent, my rehabilitation from a bad accident and when my last marble rolled under a shrinks couch I wrote a novel. Yes, it was for therapy, but, no, the content was not therapeutic, nor was it intended to be. The therapy was to fill in time, to focus, to set a task that would fill large gaps of time, time that could have been potentially misused, potentially filled with … unproductive thoughts.
The digital age sort of took over everything everywhere. I noticed a few years back that the writers hump I’d had on my right middle finger, a callous from pressing a pen or pencil into the finger with my right index finger, is gone. I … shit, I’m my own ringing phone. I need the discipline. I also need … I hate to admit this … to allow myself into dark places. I used the word afraid before and I could use it again. It’s a misdirection like the way a soldier will use the word honor to defend brutal actions, no, sorry, I don’t mean that, speech makers use the word honor to defend a soldiers brutal actions. Honor and fear are both powerful concepts, both powerfully misused.
Honor is adherence to a code of conduct, it is not in itself a positive or negative code of conduct, just the integrity of maintaining the code; leaving the dance with the one who brought you. Fear, well, shit, I don’t know, maybe people are as afraid of things as they say. I either don’t have the sense to be afraid or something is broken. I don’t usually mean fear so much as anticipation of loss. Believing something unpleasant will happen, it’s hardly paralyzing like the fear of heights or spiders. And, sad to say, it’s not irrational.
Heh, two paragraphs back the phone rang. I’m just going to post this stupid shit so that someday I can look back and pinpoint the approximate date I lost my motherfucking mind up in here.
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