( BEGIN NOTE: This will be my last new post for the next week or so. I might post some half-ass text driven commercials for my book, From out there, From far out there, and I must say, going to be real good, but that could be that high you have when you’re getting towards the end of a project. I’m learning, albeit slowly, not to set myself up for that artistic plight of the this wasn’t as good as I thought it was hangover. Damn and always remember, This isn’t a game, it’s life, and you do what you do, and I do this, and so as long as I’m not dead in a gutter I’ll be writing and trying to become better at, only living my damn life in a good way. Anyway blah, I have too much shit to do but man, typing and not editing feels so good right now, you know what I mean (asking the collective conscious of the human species)? It’s kinda like the not so bad parts of my memory of going to the dentist as a kid. I think. Ha. Never mind. So yeah, New books out soon. Editing and working my ass off for another day, and then I’m going to see some old friends, doing some well earned, let’s just say, bending. For some reason the winter is, in many ways, my summer. The savages don’t come out as much. The night is once again mine. Lastly, here are some words that might appear in the new book, I’m not sure yet but who cares, ha! END NOTE)
The winter was here. The fall murdered the spring. I turned the channel on the car’s radio.
You alright still?
yeah.
We’re almost home. Seems like forever since I slept in my bed she said
And it had only been two days, but sometimes two days is enough. Sometimes you forget about how privileged you can be at times, just to be able to sleep in a room, a small room, but your room none the less.
She wasn’t used to my way of going about things. She wasn’t used to the cheap hotels and walking miles and the lack of options you get with basic cable.
She wasn’t used to the people who need to be heard. The way they look and the sadness and desperation in their eyes. She wasn’t used to My America, My United States; she wasn’t used to the outcome of our political misgivings, our failed wars, our misunderstood economic under-achievement. She wasn’t used to any of it, but neither was I, not back then, back when this was new, back then when it was my first time, but…
You just have to go I said
I want to know what you do she said
And so I took her with me. She wasn’t horrified; no, rather she was, confused. She wasn’t used to the truth of the american library, and how it’s often used as a halfway house to pass the time before the night closes the doors on what they call, The Nine to Five.
And it had only been two days, two days of walking around and asking people what anything is all about. She wanted to know what I do. I told her…
There’s not much to it. You just walk around and keep track…
Of what she asked.
Of what’s going down.
Are you coming to bed she asked, it’s 1234 in the morning; you’re going to burn your eyes out.
Not now I said
No, she wasn’t used to the long and tired late night eyes and tapping keys and the short intervals of peace one finds in the mandatory pacing of smoke breaks.
She wasn’t used to the highs and lows and dramatic internal voices that caused hands to reach for pain killers when something is triggered as angry cells are fired from eyes to brain to attack what was written down on notes with names and facts and places on the back of receipts from everywhere you go on any given day.
No, I have a few more hours left I said.
I miss my bed she said.
We’ll go home before the afternoon I said. I’ve got just about all I can get here. I’ll be in bed before you even know it.
It was almost five when I went to bed only to roll around until six suffering with waking nightmares of what I just did to myself with words and the keyboard and everything that is, The Story.
No, she wasn’t used to the all nighters and the tapping keys like only ticks without the exhaling of the tocks of the watch that blinks away the night, effortlessly.
She wasn’t used to the life, the writers life, the reporters life, and…
Nobody is cut out for this shit I told her. It’s just what you have to do. We’ll go home tomorrow I said. I promise.
Adventures In American Writing 