I write best when there’s not enough time.
With too much time, I’m hopeless.
Not Enough Is The Right Amount
Tag Archives: writing process
Waiting Game
Not knowing and waiting, that’s where the promise lives.
Knowing – no matter what – especially if it’s not true.
That faith – and lie – is better than any proof.
It’s all we need to get to the end.
The Thing of Expression
You go down the pipeline thinking you know something you don’t and it isn’t a bad thing but it’s an obvious thing and that’s still okay but then you remember it really isn’t because that’s sliding to nowhere, not knowing who you are and thinking that’s okay when it isn’t.
Then you’re left asking who are all these people are and how did they get into your living room.
To Kiss Others
“I’m going to kiss others.” And then her lips were on mine, and I was closing the blinds, people trying to peek in, her naked body there, all of it over too quickly.
I didn’t remember much, but she was pregnant and we were married. And then the accident, she paralyzed from the waist down. We didn’t make it.
I was back in her neighborhood years later, at a fundraiser. I stayed at the periphery, thinking I might glimpse her but only saw her friends, and went back down the hallway, and she was there, her hair lighter now, elegant as ever. I whispered her name. She began to cry. “You came.”
I wanted to hold her but knew that would make it worse and kept a respectful distance, leaving later, talking with her assistant about what arrangements might be made for later.
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.
I Appreciate You. Now Fuck Off.
If you were to ask me how I’m doing, I would say I’m pretty good. A bit tired but getting some reading done, recharging my battery, all that. And then I’d ask how you are, and we would go on like that, like usual. But I’m not. Doing well that is. On a scale of 1-10, I’d give myself a one or two. I’m low. I’m losing the point of this. Fight on. I can’t go on. I must go on. All that. But we’re in the shitter. I am anyway. I’ve lost the faith, if I ever had it. It’s not just Trump & Putin, although they’re sure part of it. It’s the hubris, the lies and hate, mine too.
I’ve always enjoyed reading biographies, Mark Twain, Robert Kennedy, Orville & Wilbur Wright, Georgia O’Keefe, Mahatma Ghandi, Leo Tolstoy, Judy Garland, Agnes Varda, Zenobia. The story is clear: You’re born, you do stuff and you die. They all struggled, found success in something, struggled again, maybe found success again, and then died. I just finished When Breathe Becomes Air, the autobiography of Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon who is diagnosed with terminal cancer. It is a rumination on mortality, littered with literary references, including Beckett’s “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” He dies before he finishes the book.
I also read Matthew McConaughey’s Green Lights. As facile as it sounds to consider an actor best known for “Alright, alright, alright”, it still has all the same moments, struggling and succeeding, trying to make sense. Alright, it is a trite read, and a little tiresome in the end, but he’s earnest and banged a whole beautiful women. And he’s not dead. Yet. Yeah, and he’s hot.
It’s better to live a life doing things, finding some sort of meaning and ‘indulging’ as McConaughey confesses. Then what? The key seems to be remembering, reflecting and sharing. But what if you don’t? What if you lose all that? You forget it all? My mother succumbed to dreaded Alzheimer’s and remembered nothing in her last years. Once a very insightful and intellectually demanding woman, she forgot everything including her beloved Mozart and The New Yorker. It was the one way she wanted to go. I’ve forgotten moments too, entire nights, years gone by and indulging too much, and all of the enjoyment I assume I had, is gone too. Like everything.
Whether we lay this planet to waste or not, this will all be forgotten. Not just my little old blog but everything else, Barbie, Mozart, Krakatoa, This space we fill will be empty and dark. There will be nothing at all. And so maybe I’m being generous with myself. I’m definitely not a two. I’m more like a one or zero.
Over-rated Mothers
His drug addled brain wouldn’t let him sleep but he remembered being trapped in an MRI machine, his arms pinned to his side, and looking back above his head at the sterile room, trying to call, but nothing was coming out of his mouth. The machine caught on fire and he woke up. He left the hotel and met Delia, a former student, sitting by the river.
She told Davis the story about when she worked at a high-end bottle service club and a patron had reached up her dress. “My mother told me I was asking for it.”
“You get along with your mother?” Davis asked.
“Mothers are overrated.” Delia eyed him. “All that self-sacrifice stuff, I get sick of that.”
He watched the clouds over the building tops and thought about going to look at the Viking ships in Roskilde in the morning. “They like to be martyrs and they hate it when they can’t sacrifice themselves.”
“I mean, my mother’s fine.” Delia looked at herself in her phone. “It’s not that I resent her for anything. She’s just my mother.”
“I forgive my mother for whatever she was supposed to have done to me.” Davis downed half of his beer. “I had this dream, more of a vision really because I think I was still awake. I was with my mother and she was in a smart button-down dress, and she looked beautiful, conservative and smart. She was younger than me and we were on the classic propeller plane going somewhere. But she was at the front of the plane with her friends.”
“That’s it?”
“I was sitting there, thinking that she would come back to me. And she didn’t.”
Dopamine Time
It was a spur of the moment thing, and she was excited to have me. She was an old friend, a successful writer, and lived on a farm north of Kingston. The conversation was animated, remembering times past.
“You were always someone I knew I could turn to.”
“Really?”
“You looked out for me.”
Dopamine was a go-to topic. “Gotta get our shot of dopamine. That’s what it’s all about.”
“Swipe left, swipe left!”
“That’s what we do.”
I drove across the bridge later that day and thought about how we only spend time with one another to be disappointed. That is what we do. That’s what she would have said too.
My Bad Chance
A number of years back, an influential agent took interest in novel, My Bad Side. He had his reader review the opening 50 pages and gave me advice on changes to make, which I did. I received a follow-up on moving the back story to a later stage. I questioned this idea, explaining the benefit of where it was. That was it. I was out.
A year or so later, I pitched him my new book, Anori. “Not for me.” The one time an agent had taken an interest in my work, a one-night stand as it was, I hadn’t done as I was told and was cancelled. I’ve thought back to this moment often and wondered what might have happened if I had complied. What success would I have reaped? If only, if only…
Today, hundreds of indifferent rejection emails later, I feel something coming, some long-awaited breakthrough, not with them as much as me. I’ve made it somewhere, not a revelation as much as a state of mind, I suppose. Probably the booze but more of a clean sure hike up, getting to where I can see where I am. Which is here. Nowhere else but that.
My latest opus, The Vanishing Pill, will be ready in the spring.
Every Day You’re Dying
Why are you here? Ask yourself that. What is the purpose? Where do you belong? I try to write like that. And then I don’t like how I feel when I go too long, my head thick, nothing working, done and lost. It seems like life isn’t worth it at that moment.
It’s not complicated to get my energy back, my brain back on its stem, even if it doesn’t feel like that. I walk and eat. And then I am new again, that clarity of purpose back inside, thinking I just came here to find the answer.
And this is it: We go fast on the roads we know and slow on the ones we don’t.
And that’s it.