Friday. I’m trying to place many periods on my life. Old work done. Old books done. Start new. I’m getting better and I have to finish what I started so I can break down another wall. I Worked on my novel and cleaned everything up. Got up at five am and was working on it until 2pm. 6th draft. On page 277 of 381. Cant take a nap or I’ll be gone. Cup of coffee and I know I can’t go back to my novel. I have to take a few days off. Should be done on time still. Black Friday. Maybe not. I hope so. It’s going to have a 7th draft. The story is still coming together. Weird. I don’t know what to do when I’m not working with my hands or working with words. I don’t like to waste time when I’m awake. So to wait for the night I’m going through old material, so much of it. Still working on a book that I planned on, called the portable kuharevicz, notes and drafts from the years 2005-2013. There are so many pieces and false ends in it. Really took about five years figuring out who the characters in my novel were. It’s strange. I’m tired and I’m just getting started. So my friends said you’re going to go out tonight. I’m not a go out kinda person lately. I like acting like an old man. But I’ll go out I suppose or I aint going to have any friends left. I was told, don’t go to bed. If I go to bed I’m out and nothing can wake me. I have four hours to kill. I don’t watch tv. I like to do things while I’m awake. Just cant go back to my novel. The wind is wild out there and the sound of the high school football games during the fall causes strange nostalgic echoes in my mind. I think it’s a good night to collect some of my writings and see what I’ve done with my youth… Wasted years. No way. Below is something I haven’t read yet. I wrote it in 2010. I don’t know why but I had a note next to it that said, “this is the best thing I’ve ever written.” Ha. I highly doubt that. I post the huge long post for those who have some time to waste as well and want to read it along with me. I wont blame if you don’t. It’s a real long spontaneous piece. ha. Get back to my novel for a few tomorrow. I’m starting to miss it, even though I’m still working on it. Weird. Thanks for reading.
A Written Improvisation(2010)
Them New dog cats and strawberry pussy cats
And there’s James Montgomery he’s the long hairdo nothing folding his hands like a monk like a praying god from the cottages and looks all around the room one two can I get a drink of that hands waving waiting for something everyone waiting for something everyone bending back and forth and looking for girls looking for girls looking for girls and there here with hair and pony tails and thoughts of mating and love and affairs and and order and the band starts and people hop and get in line and stand and stare but not one brown eyes not one blue eyes all cross-eyed fluttering in pin ball machines and lighting jukeboxes rocking holly and gin and juice and big band gangster Scooby with dog touchups of eyebrow’s and tongues rolled out red carpet licking lips and bug eyes out for the girls-girl- girls and snakes and hey where you been and hey you back from the dead dirt ground cause monks back from the dead and parker lost in digital boppers that don’t know what going on and they all come and all these kids from the white gates and the white grass and the lost island and inland midlands of one percent tribes of old Indians of the suburbs dream and come to the city that has been cleared out but their here and they hear cause the war still roars with eagles and teenagers and young men in their twenties all looking for the music to swing around and bounce up and down and drink a slurp and slap a bar stool and them screaming and a blurt burp blurb and down a backup again heads up and down and people just looks and I make eye contact with you and your hair is in pig tails and red ribbons like some kind of strawberry that tastes as good as your lips are red from the last time you bit me hard and made me bleed and we just keep staring…
Just tuning up my instrument
No sounds are around at the moment. Sleeping and dreams are underway. Most of the lights are out and the world the city the Universe waits. At any moment that door could open. At any moment the door could shut and creak and moan with those cold bodies that just got back from the frozen desert, from what a wise Brooklyn man would call the Air Conditioned Nightmare.
The land is frozen and most of the windows have a layer of ice on them while they all dream of the water and the sticky toes in the sand and burned skin of the months of July. The wilderness sleeps and waits as well. Everything just waits and nuzzles up to other warm bodies and love is found out of natural necessity. The roads are bare and the lines are written over by the frigid beasts of collectivize northern psychosis. In the winter everything either alive or dead or never intended to live in the first place shows its breath as it goes along in the day but usually the night because it’s always the night this time of year.
The train brings students and wives and children and lost fathers with suits and toys for their kiddos and the train as it has chugged along for all these years is tired and as if an old man it breathes so heavily. In the winter the smoke of its turning lungs reach up in the sky while it moves back and forth between cities on those tracks that contain almost all of America’s rich and dark past that has all led us here, to a point where collective chaos has arrived at last.
All that air released from all those objects and bodies and hearts and souls and lines of cars enclosed in their metal and beautifully designed boxes wait at these lights that tell them when they can go and when they can’t go. People all curled up in scarf’s and still wearing perfume and gloves on the hands and even the animals wear hoodies this time of the year. Even the streets breath in and out and as if smoking too much they collide with the dirt and the pollutants and the money that falls into the bucket as a man in a nice suit sipping him some coffee asks you if you want to save the children or the veterans or with just a bit of copper you can save the dying. Little do you they know that even though you walk around with a pretty girl and have some of what they call charm your pockets are empty and your stomach is empty and you’re so tired and your mind, man you smile, but your soul, brother that’s almost empty too.
It’s easy to save a face on a postcard but it’s hard to say yes to what’s right in front of you and of course you want to save the children but how can you do that when their parents can’t even save them and you can’t even save yourself and hell Jesus Christ I have been told my whole life he couldn’t save himself.
It’s just cold that’s all and the only relief is going into the bookstore and being surrounded by all of those writers and novels and passions that I don’t really contain but just the dream of such grace and presence and saintliness that I think every writer has somewhere within their soul just breaks me down warms me up and fills my heart with kindness and hopefulness and the eyes of an inspired child. The awareness that these writers teach me kindly remind me about the door being closed and the light being switched on and say just go and write cause that’s what you love to do and nothing really will ever stop you. Writing is a drug and it’s free and you can do it when you’re poor when you’re alone when you don’t have one of those machines they call a car, when you have to defer on your university loans cause you’re starving and always down to a couple coins.
But the dreamer is the artist and long after all the art in the world disappears, which it will, all those paintings and statues and cities and monuments and trends and books and paints and pastels and crayons instruments voices and universities, they all someday will disappear and never be remembered. The art work will disappear from all that the future sees but you know what? The artists the writer the painter the poet the humanitarian the savior the philosopher the genius the scholar the reader the teacher the hands, they will never disappear. All that material goo will be wiped away in the tremendous perpetual movement of years and death that halts the rhythm of life. There will come a day when the machine will stop just for a little bit and the truth that we found and some of that truth that we created will freeze and then be broken apart by a hammer in the night by vandals and thief’s that will probably be some of the only survivors who were prepared enough for this reemergence of originality. These men and woman and children the human souls that are beyond rebellion beyond servitude beyond sweatshops beyond anarchy beyond dinner parties beyond fast food beyond death beyond life beyond religion beyond labels and conception; these people will wake up to a new day and they will ask: Where did everybody go? Where is all the art? Where is all the gold?
Years and thousands of years will go by and progression sometimes leads backwards then forwards again; the sun will rise and the old will be knocked down and some child one day will look up at the full moon one night at the beach or be starving in their late teens and ask, “What is all this good for?”
This person will grow up and pick up the first stone the first sword the first paint brush the first pencil. This person will start the gears going over and over again and put some machine together that makes his or her writing easier. Words will be written again most likely cities and express lanes and shopping malls and wars and machine guns and drug wars and once again life will go on. Art will start over and come back to life when the world is recreated but the artist’s destiny, if that’s what you call it, will go on until the sun no longer sees the point of burning and tossing its child the Earth the most kind of life giving lights the universe provides throughout all those dimensions of interlocking keys scattered throughout the cosmos. This will all happen again.
I’m just tuning up my Instrument.
Those winter streets are devastating if you don’t prepare yourself for what it’s going to be like. I put on two sweaters and a flannel and before I went out I looked at the plants inside and all my warm roommates who lock themselves away in the winter and look at screens and walk back and forth. I looked at the heater that turns on in the middle of the night when I need it the most, and as condensation dripped down the inside of the windows to the outside world I thought about what’s out there.
So I wrapped myself up like a ninja and went out there and it was only five degrees outside but that’s so cold it really doesn’t make any difference at all. My nose and hands were already numb so what’s the difference. I had my head phones on and I waited at the bus stop leaning on the sign as cars went by and smoked a smoke and looked up at that clear sky and talked to the moon. I said “hey there moon how you doing tonight old fella”. The moon was proud and surrounded by his stars and said back “man I’m just here, just like you, I’m just here”. Together we waited like two souls just out there, far out there. Man it’s all good and I couldn’t just sit in the house. I had to go out. The night was here and even if I didn’t have a dime to spend I knew there was something to see to feel, some books to find some girls to look at some coffee somewhere out there, even far out there.
I got on the bus and everyone was bundled up like their parents dressed them and they waited there in their own worlds and the world around them continued to freeze over. I got dropped off downtown and the first thing I did was dance as I slid on the ice and in my head maybe out loud I sang some tune as if I was in a play or staged performance. The night was mine and the time was mine.
There was nothing to do all the shops were closed and people were at home safe away from the weather but the lonely streets kept me company as I walked on. I stopped in an ally for a second and looked around and saw this man coming towards me, you could tell that he wanted something and so did I, so did everyone. He asked for change and cigarettes and all the people said “no sorry I don’t have anything”, or they said nothing at all and pretended like they didn’t see a ghost, a real human soul. The common man kept saying no and I wanted to say no too, cause I only had a few smokes left and a dollar in my pocket but I remembered that the writer the artist the human being should always say yes, that’s the first thing you have to learn, that bald man from Brooklyn once told me that first truth.
So the man walked up to me and before he could say a word I had a smoke and a crisp dollar waiting for him. “Thanks man” he said “yeah no worries” I said back. We said nothing more. We just sat there in the ally and looked at the nightclub below us where cars were pulling up and dropping off their woman and grown men I tell you were yelling like angry thugs trying to overthrow some kind of dictatorship. Me and this guy with kind eyes but man cold eyes just sat there and looked at the frozen light that reflected off of all those neon signs. We just stood there like a couple of rebels couple of hobos couple of outlaws and didn’t say a word, just smoked our cigarettes as the night slowly melted on and further triggered our laughter. I walked away told the guy to have a good night and you as well he nodded his head. He just stood there holding onto his dollar smoking his cigarette and waiting for another uncommon man to give him a hand out. I’m sure he found his way to a warm place to sleep to eat to drink to smack to hum to dream to talk to whisper to sling some lingo towards others who wander the streets at night, even a stray knows where the getting is good and where light is always on.
And man I’m just tuning up I tell you. I’m walking down Main Street with my hands out and numb bopping my head while people lurk behind me in front of me and all these students going crazy in their university cells having mental breakdowns trying to remember all these names and places and mathematical tables so they can just go home and be a kid again.
I was walking through the University of Michigan Campus and an ambulance was parked by a building, I think it was a dorm room, and they were running into hall to get some girl who had such a conflict of resolution with her studious liabilities that she just melted completely down. I asked one of the medical men waiting for the other medical men what happened. “Things like this happen all the time during exam week, people take too much speed alone in isolation then they just crack”. You don’t say, that’s interesting, man what a whirlwind that was. Kids from suburbia cracking like eggs or burning like ants under a magnifying glass at one of the best universities in all of these states, right in my own backyard of Michigan. Existential crisis temporary metal delusion temporize this and that, it’s all the same.
The girl couldn’t move. She couldn’t see her own face and eyes; she just waited for help and rested her psychotic head on the greatest of all books. Poor girl I thought then I skipped along to see what was all the fuss over there over there over there; it was all around me, all these sounds and glances and miles of pavement where the world was open and I could skate with shoes surrounded by accepted and temporary madness.
The city of Ann Arbor was mad and maybe the entire state went mad while studying physics engineering corporate debauchery written thought. Man, all those great mad men and their brilliant depressions came back and got in everybody’s head and said learn me, do it now all night long honey pie. They stay up for days on all those meds and man I kind of feel like the common man for the first time in a long time cause the world has temporally gone mad and I can thank that Einstein and Spinoza and the great Buddha and thank you the department of psychology the department of creative writing the department of applied science the department of comparative religion. Thank you, you have unleashed the loonies in this town and they’re the same people in the same cloths with the same faces. I can keep up with this in those coffee shops that steam with pens and screens and scraping heads and nauseas eyes. I can keep up with all of this. This is more like it.
The world moves so fast in this city right now, right at my speed I would say and the Christmas carols don’t even get to me. All I hear is the sax of Charlie Parker the sounds of a paperback writer, the sounds of just an entire population waiting for the man. In two days they will back in the outside of Chicago and back in New Jersey back in China and Israel Rhode Island and Texas. Soon all these poor kiddos will get their sanity back and microwave their hot cocoa and show their grades to their parents and ask, what’s next?
The town moves at my speed right now, I’ve seen it before and been there before. The thing is I’ve always enjoyed staying up all night writing and reading and drinking coffee. This life suits me and what most would call work I call it pure bliss, the closet to Heaven I will ever get. So I just walk on. I move and shift and slow down my legs that by now are so frozen that nothing really matters. It feels if its fifty degrees out here right now, my face is tanning colors like it did when I was down south writing In Saint Petersburg Florida. I never thought I would come back to Michigan. But here I am, right in the middle of it all.
People like future lawyers and bankers are losing their cool all around me. I’m Back in Michigan and I just keep writing and living this written life trying to find some kind of shoe lace or bumper sticker or empty can to kick over just to see what kind of rhythm I can find so that I can jot me down one of those lines those poems those flowers that never wither way but sometimes with their eyes covered by their green hands when the panic is stricken pretend not to be awake when you knock on the bedroom door. I just keep looking for that water and life even if it’s taking all these drops to remedy their existential headaches. I keep hiding and following that smell of life and its here right now at this very moment, it’s all around me.
I’ve spotted the song and I run after it trying like an archeologist on a great Atlantic dig or dusting the dirt of an ancient scroll, I follow that life; I track it down and say, “Just for one second can I bother you and have a fraction of your time, so that I can take a picture of you?” “Thank you very much”, I tell life after I’ve snapped the photograph. Life, look at this, what a great memory, what a great picture, life you’re beautiful!
Life walks away, I stand there next to a brick building that inside people are getting they’re haircuts wearing a black gown. Their hair falls all around them, they looks so nervous. I stand there; they all look like pretty little dogs getting a trim. While the night grows older and more desolate I look around for the tiniest speckle of dust and blade of grass and twig and wrapper to spark that camera once again. I stand their freezing and being downtown really for no reason. I decide to grab a cup of coffee, and then head back home to develop my film.
And now I’m once again sitting on a couch typing the ending of this one man writing workshop that god only knows how long I’ve been at it. I started writing this when people went to bed now I’m worried it won’t be done before they get up. This shouldn’t bother me cause I’m in my dark room hanging up all these negatives about what was out there, what was in my mind and maybe not as real as it seems now but, wait a second, I walked home from downtown in the three degree weather after I drank a couple cups of coffee. I left the house to go out, just to see to smell to taste the world as it was. I lived to capture just one thing as it was, as it happened. Wait a second, the rhythm section is still playing in the background, there becoming clearer; there’re all tuned up and ready to play one last tune.
Glass door shut behind me and the voices were cut off and high on life on caffeine on the pictures I took. The roll is full so I start to walk back home.
Walking home the land is as abandoned as it was before. I’m walking fast; I have maybe two miles to go before I can walk back through those doors again. I feel my body and all of a sudden I’m washed over as out of nowhere I feel completely alive walking through the ice jungles of the city passed empty parking lots and smoking stacks coming out of those houses. Walking back for maybe one of the last times in Ann Arbor Michigan and I know I’m not going to sleep this night and yes I will see the sun come up once again because I’m going to finish this dialog, this experiment in spontaneous prose before I allow myself to ever sleep again .
The thing is I’m not that cold at all. Maybe it’s because I’m dying and I’ve heard freezing to death is the best way to go, to leave this world if it’s going to happen. Music through my headphones but it keeps skipping while more snow plows find work when the sky opens up its ice box and covers the green dead land with marshmallows as frozen daggers hang off of all the buildings in the city. The side walk is covered in snow as well but I don’t mind, the soles on my shoes are so worn down that my feet covered by three pair of socks hold me to the ground.
Back down this same street in a town that I thought yeah maybe this could be my home. I thought so many thoughts when I first moved here, when I moved here for music for soul for life for a new scene to learn from the writers of the university, moved once again to see something new. It’s been a hell of a trip this Ann Arbor stint and I wouldn’t change it for the world. Fired form a job for lacking focus selling wine and going right back to my old ways of being that strange writer that’s defined his life so very much as being a writer that it’s hard to even get into his writing. I became who I am once again. There is no turning back, there never really was. Who was I kidding? I was no retail salesmen.
At that same light again, the intersection of Stone School and Packard. I cross the street take off my hat and breathe out and slowly I just smile and look up at the moon again. This time I don’t say a word for the moon may be sleeping. I just look at that sliver in the sky and give it thumbs up and say thank you old friend for always being there for me. What a journey what a ride what an education what a meet and greet, what a series of ongoing small talks where in the end I was only led back to these keys and words and visions that are out there, sometimes far out there and always in front of all our eyes, pictures and scrapbooks of reality that just maybe seem a bit different to you.
Those negatives are ready and once again there all in front of me. I don’t know why I write all of the time and sometimes it’s strange and makes me feel like an alien with green horns wearing tenna-shoes. Two books will be finished this year that are a bit more functional than this unorthodox piece that maybe someone someday will read. One book about cities and towns in Michigan and the other a book on dreams; these might connect to the public at large, for they tell more of what some may call an objective portrayal of life as most of them I hear know it to be lived like. But this is the spontaneous method and it keeps going and is hanging around in the middle of everything somewhere between complete absolute and complete uncertainty. Even if it’s not always on the road it’s always at your fingertips because I’m not telling you how I think it is, I’m just showing you how it is.
I write this for my family that I only want to see happy and healthy and those children that I can’t wait to raise and for my grandmother that for reason believes in me. I thank all my friends who cover my ass when other people have said I’ve went crazy and strung out of control while losing himself somewhere down south. I thank all of those who are just there standing by the corner waiting to cross the street and all the musicians who have ever played any kind of tune that got my body moving in ways I never thought it would move. If it is asked why the writer writes it can be said that he writes to live life and embrace his future death. In the state theater I yell at the top of my lungs that everything is going to be just fine. I will be your voice your heart your misery your happiness your air that you can always breathe.
Man that sun is taking the moons place and my body is tired but one more breath of fresh air and typing with my hands tied behind my back and I blow in the wind with nothing much more to say. The sax was blowing in the rhythm of my heart and that sun I’m not hiding from it anymore. Everything that I’ve seen from Florida from the heart of this country that has so many hearts that I don’t think it will ever truly fall into complete darkness. All that beautiful land and trails and stories that all of these people these great people have told me. From the richest to the most down and out and please help out these people more cause they need a hand and they were born just like you. I gave a pen and some paper to a homeless guy one day and said “just write it down man. Just tell yourself how it is”. He said he used to write when he was younger but doesn’t think he could even put a few sentences together anymore. “Sure you can man” I said “you never forget that stuff, it’s always inside of you, it’s always been inside of you”. Man it’s in everyone.
I’ve said it before that I’m doing nothing new here. Love has been around since the first human being awoke to the realization that dang I’m a conscious being with these lumpy toes and hands that stretch in front of me and these eyes oh my there are others just like me. Love aint new either, but like writing and music and daydreaming, these are all natural and
necessary aspects of human life, of the creative mind.
The condensation still drips and I’m still so far away from the work that I will create delicately or desperately somewhere down the line of this life. The best days of this brilliant life are ahead of me and they always were. On into the sunrise I go as more snow forms and the workday once again has arrived. That haze and pink and scenic picture is right over there, I can see it, the little house surrounded by gates and the American Flag waving in the frigid Michigan Wind. Miles of what at times seems to be death during these winter months but really is just in all honesty the sleeping of life that needs to rest once in a while so that it can come back refreshed with clear and awake eyes. The night is over and my fingers can rest and as I said Before, I’m just tuning my Instrument.
Adventures In American Writing 