I am a cluttered table of half-formed thoughts. The floor hurts, because things have fallen down out of sight but still exist. There’s sunlight at the window.
Okay, I’m not sure what I’m doing. (But you already know that.) Would you walk with me a moment? Maybe we can figure it out.
***
Rich leaned over, and held up his phone with the Substack paid renewal on it. We were hanging out at the lodge last weekend, putting on an astronomy program for the tourists.
“Thanks, man! Blogging is my favorite thing ever to do.”
“You’re welcome.”
It started a few years ago. An editor answered “practice” to the question. (How to get better.) Burnt out of straining at six strings, I traded one format for another, a pen substituting for a guitar. I guess a keyboard would be more accurate, and a better parallel.
Writing, man. I dig it. Sometimes I feel silly, but remember that you have the Delete key, too. (But I still feel silly sometimes, and always plan on keeping that close by on the shelf, between the dictionaries and the typewriter.)
***
Once I spent three days staring at my studio wall, trying to invent a new guitar riff. I finally did, and then realized I plagiarized a riff I wrote last year, and then went outside, mad. The whole wall would shake when you slammed that door.
“Papa Bach, how do you come up with your ideas?”
“Why, my dear boy, it’s hard not to step on them when I get out of bed in the morning.”
Oh, to be Bach.
But now, writing (and still no Bach) I see the things everywhere. The bright aluminum of the dump truck bed, heat shadows from the growling diesel, and the driver giving me some good advice on how to grade a road. Maybe that’s an answer to the endless abstraction of the Internet.
The moon glancing off the frog pond at 2 am while I blink sleepily at it, and then stumble back to bed, but not before thinking of a young friend. They’re grappling with the sudden death of an old crush who lost control and slammed into a trailer. “She didn’t want to go in her sleep” he said. It was also at 2 am. Like the moon on the pond somehow.
There’s so much.
The more I write, the more I think, and the more I think, the more I realize I am a cluttered table of half-formed thoughts. The floor hurts, because things have fallen down out of sight but still exist. There’s sunlight at the window.
I finished Hemmingway’s A Farewell to Arms the other day. Catherine died just west of Bedford. It was an audiobook, and I was driving, and it was very sad.* It seemed a good place to end a war novel. Bedford. The Bedford Boys and their D-Day catastrophe.
I loved it, and hated it, and felt like he was a new friend who I knew I should like, and pretended to like with extra zeal, but deep down knew he was a scoundrel and that would come to light soon.
*(I’ve also taken to ripping him off, and Faulkner. Badly.)
To make the best movie out of the book, this would be the interpretation:
(We’re the losers. Hemmingway hits us in the face, over and over, simple and clean.)
There’s the faintest taste of blood.
***
I’ve been to Barnes and Noble twice lately. Why does it feel sick, like they’ve swapped out all the produce with candy and the only thing real is a plastic-wrapped dish of corn on the cob, or, in this case, some classic lit wrapped in China?
The people seem ill, but buy more and more.
Maybe this candy bar will nourish.
(It won’t.)
There’s too much darkness in it.
***
So I don’t know what I’m doing here, but I thank you kindly for walking with me, for paying attention (and sometimes paying, but that’s never ever expected).
I’d so like to be a great builder, or welder, or tycoon, or something to point to, but right now, the door in front of me to kick in seems to be writing. I always try to listen to orders, so I’ll kick. Sometimes it goes sideways, getting stuck in the ditch of delusions of grandeur. But I hope it’s useful in some way.
To make a long story short, here’s the poem that predated all of this.
Darkness
It hangs like the
Stale smoke that used to cling to my guitars in another life
The morning after the lousy bar gigs, steps taken to get Somewhere
Sometimes it’s sculpted into dizzying heights of Fine Art, Bastions of Culture
“Don’t write very unless you’re Hemmingway and very drunk”
(And we pretend to like it, like we pretend to like the scoundrel of a new friend because we crave being liked back oh just for a little approving laugh and a nod.)
Sometimes it’s crude and brash and bosh, the mediocrity of lecherous old men and their journals where they think they’re somebody, codifying and excusing their trespasses by a readership that laughs when they shouldn’t, either.
But it’s always there.
In its midst down by the river
I’m forging a bright blade
against
The Darkness.
So that’s what I’m doing. Any thoughts?
–Josh
Bachelor Buttons bloom by the driveway, uninvited, but most welcome.