Here's a Thought

I don't know what it was that convinced me that everyone had it figured out but it was probably something like someone I don't even like getting married or having a second kid. That usually does it right?

So then I'm in the bathroom mad as all fucking hell at winter with the drops of water all over my body feeling like tiny planets passed the Heliopause and my beard looks like shit and there's toothpaste on my nose and it occurs to me I don't have it figured out. Like at all. 

Titrations

Residual heat comes from the western wall of a masonry building long after the sun is slunk below the furthest twig of pavement you see. Lean against it; feel it creep around under your shirt like a microscopic domesticated mammal. Pick a star and start there counting. Lose track as clouds.

Wile the way down steps toward your door and put on anything. Sounds of some kind. Turn off all light and then turn back pretend or hope the dark smoke clears with the switch. Strip. Sit at your desk on cold metal. Pimple at the pricks of your follicles and their cells and their nerves. Put on layers of the nicest thing you own. Fill with smoke. Sweat.

Figure the ocean has answers. Ask the questions. Get only waves in reply.

Figure the sidewalk talks. Go five miles and take the bus back. Diesel.

Figure a bottle sings. Play the flute of it; the jaw harp of it.

Palpitate your corners, joints, joists, abutments.

Focus your myopia on grid and dictionary. Compose yourself; look straight.

Moment passes. She leaves without so much as asking you to call tomorrow or suggesting that she will. And so you lean against the still, hot bricks. Your high school chemistry would crystallize a laundry blue liquid into flakes of silver with the addition of something in equal proportions mole and catalyst. Now the precipitate is words but they walk towards cabs and buses opposite where you are sitting subterranean or suborbital: windowed in.

To crystallize these things. The microscopic sensations off the bricks, the appearance of a footprint drying on the sidewalk, the light reflecting on and off of the acrylic lines on the road as cars pass. Where ordinarily your solipsism would permit your reticence there is found a glowing wad of extroversion.

Scour surface for answer. The Internet and it’s Whitmanic lists and shopping malls and those malls’ lists. Part and parcel enigma of emotion to satisfy character count. Slowly slowly dissolve the usefulness of pixel and bandwidth axle.

Question arises moonwise as while you sit next to the speakers on loud and want to crawl into them and walk in circles around the grooves of the record with the guitars and synths following you like ivy and sunlight.

The artifice of intention realizes itself in a heap of fur at the foot of your bed and the motion of moment is the liquid your brain and the hot room and the condensation of alcohol and the tap of  beat and bass in your subterranean or suborbital room.

Photographs do not have wind, paintings do not have dust, a song does not have temperature. Artifice of artifice all things are artifice.

Swimming pool deep end of room by the drain hover. Calculate and extrapolate formula upon panic attack worth of figures to cram this into a bottle that you can hurl out into the hot street to break and splash and dry and break again in the thunder of the storm you see out over New Jersey.

The Mortician: An Essay on Writer's Block

It is raining. This is melting the snow. It took a few good days of rain to finally melt last year's two feet of snow and that came around March. It is January and it snowed two days ago. This snow is gone already. 

I had started mending my friend's parents' lawn today. Maybe this is why I falsely believe it is spring. I put on a worn out shirt and my cowboy-tight, ripped work jeans. It was like theolddays. April. Mucking a golf course east of Wichita before undergrad on the east coast. 

It is muddy here in this Staten Island yard; not as muddy as the trenches of Kellogg, nor as silty but overgrown and reeking of years of rotting peaches from a lone, diminutive, un-pruned tree. Mulberries poke their heads out through weeds like rye. These must be cut by me and cut again and cut again. It rains harder.

Harder. Hard enough to dampen my clothes faster than my body heat can dry them out. I retire to my car. Tilting the seat toward Kill van Kull where a ship passes. I doze with my knees poking through their well-deserved holes. I doze like theolddays only, now, I don't get paid for lounging. Rain means another day I have to wait for a check. This keeps me from dozing. I head for coffee. Find some at a deli. It is terrible. 

I hope some voodoo or wishful thinking will clear the rain. I am paid by the job not the hour now. It kills me to wait here as opposed to theolddays where I would sleep in the heat, my check trickling up like a broken sprinkler-head futilely trying to nurse a new berm. 

I suck the coffee through the hole in the lid; let the windows blur. I go in and let Mrs. Spinelli know I will be back in the morning. Another day the check is delayed.

I drive around for awhile in the false spring. I drive deliberately through puddles and listen intently as the water meets the running boards like a dozen snare drums. There are new suspension parts behind my tires, it is good to get the salt off.  Salt begets rust. Rust begets break. Break begets wreck. Wreck begets repair. Repair begets bills. Bills beget a necessity to work with my body again.

This is a writer's problem.

The mind is no use to anyone so the body must be sold. Turn a spade, watch a child or cat or watch many children and be called a professor. My mind is no use to anyone but the mortician. She will dissect my brain and make my poems expensive realizing they are so rare: like diamonds except with less dictators and more women.

Three Week Hunger

I seem to have established a blogging pattern of once every three weeks. I know I am breaking all kinds of rules by doing this. First, I should be doing it once a week, second I shouldn't be making a post about how I never post. 

However, I think self-deprecation is necessary at times and particularly revealing about personality. I think my problem is that I tend to overthink my words. I know that this blog is not read by anyone for world advice or creative insight. Though, that is probably anyone's loss. I mean, the reason I am not here every other day is I do not want to waste my and your time on petty stuff. That is not to say people who do blog more regularly are petty just that if I were to blog that often it would be. 

My writing hunger, occurring only in three week intervals is interesting me and I wonder about the cause. I have reached a few theories about why I come back to this when I do:

• Money. Creativity is a function of contentedness and contentedness is an inverse function of stress. When my bank account is nice and cushiony I have the freedom of mind to write rather than worry about which check needs to clear first.
• Time. I think I play a pendulum game with my leisure time. I give huge blocks of it away to editing my work, other people's work, my magazine, other people's magazines, political causes, environmental causes and bass guitar solos only to later about-face and drop everything to have some personal time, wherein I write.
• Sleep. This one I am still working out. I have had about 1000000 good ideas come to me just before falling asleep and had to pry myself from the warm clutches of my bed. This was a bit of a learning curve. I kept promising to myself that I would write the ideas down in the morning. However I started to realize that they were the beginning of dreams, that is REM stuff spilling into the last remnants of consciousness and if I did not write them I would never see them again. So write I did. Jumped out of bed like I was haunted to get them down. Most are still just ideas but I think they are going places. Other times I cannot make a pen move when I am tired. Others I ramble out forever thinking I am writing the next On The Road to come up with an incoherent piece of crap...which I guess is a lot like On the Road. Right now, I am somewhere in between that REM/incoherrent stage. I am definitely tired but my ideas seem to be coming out well. In fact, this late night post which started as just musing on the strange cycles of my work ethic has actually turned into an analytic Ars Poetica. Which is groovy.
• Decision Fatigue This is some pretty neat new science. It seems to be that the more stuff you have to choose between the worse you get at it. Your mind gets tired and actually stops deciding which usually means defaulting and picking something that was actually picked for you not by you. When it comes to writing there is no default. Every word is a choice and to make even one choice badly can ruin everything. Inhibition certainly plays a part when decision fatigue takes over. How many systems have we derived to work around inhibition? I think of automatic writing, first-thought-best-thought and a rather myriad of mental function inhibitors. Inhibition is just the brain trying to protect you from dying so when you inhibit the brain you take inhibition with it. Neat eh?

So here we have it these are my reasons for avoiding my personal challenges. What are your favorite cop-outs? The first step to recovery is acceptance.

I am not positive about the etymology of the word concerted but it calls to mind the image of many things working together to produce one thing more forceful than simply their sum. This marks the beginning of a concerted effort by my constituent parts to work together to make this blog my writing better than I am probably qualified for.