How I am surviving a heart attack and quadruple bypass, and maybe even surviving life...

Saturday, September 20, 2008

09.20.08 2

what to write about...

Create the page, place the words on the page.

So many thoughts, the white noise of it, rather my mind be empty.

An open field, to play and dance in.

Like Peter Max told me personally -- yes personally, during a college paper interview where we sat in the little lobby of the campus station, his manager off to the side arms folded glancing pointedly at his watch every minute - when you prepare to create, your mind should be an empty bowl. No restrictions, like a dancer who lets himself step anywhere, do anything.

But at the same time, structure is needed -- and here I almost types 'destructure'. Discipline and structure, what I meant?

John Updike admits that when he was starting writing, in college, in high school, he wasn't interested in writing, in fiction, necessarily. He wanted to make a book. The physical object of it. Is this what I want too? To have something to hold out on my hands and show people, prove to people, prove my worth. But then what does this mean, this moment typing? These strings of moments? Are they pearls I lace, when other moments are scattered as dust that very second? I don't know.

Do these moments that leave a slug-trail as words mean more, are worth more, than those moments where nothing is left behind?

Am I looking at moments wrong? Life, Time, like movie frames and not like an outflowing from the Now? Am I trying to capture something that is not capturable? Or does not even exist? The sadness of the little moving box I think I am living in.

Maybe I should just get drunk, like every other guy on the planet on a Saturday...



09.20.08

The air is pregnant today, with... something.
Thick.
In a way, maybe holding the threat of autumn oozing brown from its clutching fingers. The mud of somnambulism, gentle rotting, and yes Death.
Fall hangs over my mind like a tree whose leaves are dying, dead, brown, tumbling dry about to bury me.



Sunday, September 14, 2008

09.14.08

Went for a bike ride this morning - a warm, actually summer-sticky, Sunday morning, here in mid-September. Around the Delaware Park ring road 3 times, looking at all the beautiful women in their tank tops and bare legs and white ipod wires, walking jogging working to become more beautiful or to keep beautiful; the mothers and fathers biking with their children clustered around them, or pushing strollers; other bikers more serious than me, leaning forward precariously on their racing bikes, in streamlined helmets and their spandex shirts and shorts.

And I wondered, that I am always just watching myself, like my life is an apathetic movie, the moments and thoughts of my life the cells blurring into fake movement as time speeds the reel down to its end.

Shit. I just want to pull the plug on that projector, shout "Fuck This!" into the empty auditorium, jump out of the booth and run down the aisle - "Fuck This! Fuck This!" - and push the doors open and bolt into the sunny daylight.