summer of chaos.
I got back into town on a motorcycle. This is what writers live for I said. I agree. No more words. Just darkness and speed and one single smoke. I didn’t care. I just wanted to go home, and I knew it no longer was real, but I still went, because I had no where else to go. I just wanted to go home and that’s the story.
And we stopped at the on ramp that brings you back down to the highway. We left after driving down hills and waiting for signs to change green after the meeting and I didn’t go for help. I went because I had nowhere else to go.
The night gets dirty and im always sweaty, and being inside is strange now after the final part of this story, the silent retreat, because I’ve been outside all summer and now the air conditioning feels like a virus, like the digital age but i like it too, because i like everything and even the pain and the depression, the misunderstanding and the yells and the screams of tires as almost getting hit by cars, and the frame of the house and the sun beats down and my skin is brown and I’m always outside, but Ive been trying to not be so much a writer in the paper mountain by going to job interviews and had my first day of training today at a manufacturing job, and more interviews and it’s strange trying to be a normal man again while living in the woods for the other half of the day. I wake up when the tent heats up like a oven, and that is at eight no matter what. I fall out of the tent and swim and shower and bike back to the town. It isn’t easy going back in the doors and the offices and the non real and the windows are cages but I want to have it all back, and I will, I work hard and I ask sometimes because I’m stranded, and we have to work together, right, wrong, isn’t that how things go, how everything works, functional you know, we have to work together, because it is the rule that bring us somewhere fresh and the future is nothing more than the harbor of the music sheet of all of this, and of the grass and the yellow flowers and the red and the summer, and the summer is something that lives in our mind, and it’s human and wild, like the crazy dance I looked down at with more respect for the land than I have ever felt before, because I do not belong here, this is not my ground. The earth belongs to the bugs and the wild cats and the most vulnerable place for a puppy is the woods. There is something to all of this and I am the guest in their house. And I thought this when I was looking down at the ant hills. This was earlier today and there was the fear i felt today and i felt like a dumb mouse because there was a giant hawk that was circling my campsite and i didn’t know if it was going to swoop down, of course that’s absurd but it kept circling and I walked around and felt fear, it got lower and then the hawk, just like a spirit, like an arrow, like an airplane, like a ghost or a cloud, the hawk flew away without even moving its wings and it was circling for the wind to gather speed, to not have to work so hard, and its all the same, and it’s about learning, and its the thought of the police and the dead boys and girls and why does this keep happening, why does the brain misfire hate and love is nothing more than something that brings us closer or further away from the hazy morning and the fog and the dew that feels like rain, and I enjoy getting lost in the morning and i cant ever find anything anymore because i’ve tried to hold on to what i have left, and honestly I don’t have that much left anymore because everything is negated in the end.
Sometimes you get help even when you don’t need it, and I met an old friend and he’ll always be a good friend. He got back from eastern Europe and said work and writing go hand in hand. I agreed, and I did agree, but I’ve been agreeing with everyone, even if i didn’t know if I agree, because I want to learn it all and sort it out later, capture the picture of us and the frame will sink to the bottom of the well that is the dark room that i see when I’m walking or working and sweating and having trouble sleeping because the present moment is hard and not easy, and my older relatives tell me life isn’t easy and they are wiser than I ever gave anybody credit for, and I’m still a boy and i need to remember this and take the wisdom from the wise and I want to give up, but give up, give what up?
And it all feels like a movie, and for the first time in a long time I’m more than just a writer, I’m living my life but tonight I’m making a mess of things again….I’m letting go and breaking free from the factory hands and the thoughts about how I’m going to get out of the bug tent and the artist, what a noble and meaningless job profession. I stop for traffic on my bike. I wave. I have been doing everything I have to do to be a good person. I haven’t been by the keys of the worded instrument in a while, the time of the past, the summer of chaos that started, wait, when did all of this start. Write read and edit later. I need to tell myself a story. I need to know what happened, and I think what happened can only be told with a novel.
And Before the highway there was the country hours and the stars and words that are always awkward and always true. There was the blood moon and the rolled down windows at night and looking at the tips of cornfields like an excited dog going to a music festival. After all of that, and even before the silent retreat, he asked me if I wanted a cigarette. Make it one worth remembering and write it down later, live it up now and smoke going eighty miles an hour holding on to my traveling backpack and I didn’t care. It felt like a great story, something new and old at the same time. I was on a motorcycle after going all over the place. Being fifteen stories up and being by the ocean, seeing skyline after skyline and now I was on the back of a motorcycle for the first time in my life. After everything I was back in Michigan and I was older, and I was going back to the lake. But why. Because everyone has to at least make believe that they have a home. This is human nature and I am a human.
These are notes about hazards lights and losing yourself in the internet, and about what are only notes that are about the war in the middle east and the Ebola outbreak in Africa. These are notes about a book that may or may not happen, and they have been written in a a library of moleskins, and they are about words that are concerned with he said she said, and they, like usual, because I only know this way, and these words follow music and they are about people i do and do not know, they are about feeling weird and feeling lonely and finding adventure because what else is there other than to live.
Adventures In American Writing 