Knowledge Messes Up My Self

I had something in me that was real. I remember it. I don’t just remember it. I was wholly in that, everything raw and wild. That was when I was a kid, and I didn’t think about it like that. I was a kid and the world was open to anything I could imagine. I want to get back to that.

My head is old now. Experiences have eroded my wiring, bashed it about with learning to kowtow, inebriation and pretending to know. The desire is the thing, on tippy toes, to keep getting up like that. And I cannot.

It reminds me of a realization of love, that thing as it was at the outset, pure, the excitement, that anticipation, all of that wonder in the eyes, then realizing it was not magic, but a drug we’re self-prescribed. And now I can’t think of it as anything else.

The light from a childhood window, the smells from the hall, sounds of people downstairs, someone approaching, a mother, maybe not, knowing that space, looking back, realizing you are there, no one to answer to, just for the moment, in that world as long as you can make it, without closing your eyes, for as long possible.

Life is Work and Work is Life

I’m coming back from two weeks in New Orleans where I was tired and uninspired and did very little writing. Instead, I read and drank and walked around. “It’s good for you,” I was told time and time again. But it didn’t feel that way. It felt like life was pointless. I felt desperate.

My father always said that if you don’t like work, you’re not going to like life. Jim Henson concurred: “I love to work. It’s the thing that I get the most satisfaction out of – and probably what I do best. I think much of the world has the wrong idea of working. It’s one of the good things in life. The feeling of accomplishment is more real and satisfying that finishing a good meal or looking at one’s accumulated wealth.”

The idea of being idle, either enjoying the company of family and friends or, worse, in retirement, are presented as goals in our society, a tendency toward inertness that has been furthered by our self-destructive attraction to our screens and just be generally stupid.

My dream is to be like Henson and my father, to be working until the end, projects on the go, one close to completion, others in production, another one or two in development, and then getting up from a table, moving onto another thing, I just don’t make and am no more.