Somewhere, in the late hours, a dance floor is missing my feet! It’s a hit hit with us, the dance floor. I’ve embarrassed the hell out of myself more than a time or two, or twenty… thousand. It’s fun and easy to grip a floor smoothly. I’ve seldom been the follower, but if it I do, I do it with easy independent grace. I’m usually the bare-breasted front runner in this eternal gasp for our soul. How can one do it otherwise? There are the others; the second and fourth back, typically, that follow the sound of the piper, along with myself, down to the circus; and it’s the sound of the fight that brings us on down, on down the three or four elongated square steps that lead to the sound of our liberation! I’ve always been a vertical dancer; compared most commonly with Snoopy and Ellen, and I like that. The only way to set it free is from the heels. Don’t let those legs be lead, set them free, bitch. And the feet, well, they must be altogether weightless, and wiling to dizzy themselves to death - and mine are. If we can dine with the devil, it had better be a dancer’s party. Oh, and I’ve agreed to work the day shift for three solid weeks. I had better stop now before it becomes a story… before, “Lisa thinks I’ve got a girlfriend.” Oh, I’ll get along to bed, in a minute or two. ;)
Today, I set out to run a few errands, just a few payday essentials to get them out of the way so that I wouldn’t have to do them later. It’s blustery today in Georgia, not too cold, but there’s a nip, and the red leaves are swirling everywhere around through the gray. I sort of wandered into a Barnes and Noble on the way back. I thought I might buy, and read, Les Miserable. I’ve always wanted to. I love the story. Valjean, I’ve always loved how he persevered in goodness, though constantly beset and bedraggled by egalitarian powers that he could not change. (You see, I was so mad when I left. I had just found out that I have to pay something in the range of $1500 for two tickets, an expired tag (my fault), and driving on a suspended license (which I didn’t know about, and might have been the fault of the county clerks office for misspelling my name in the system, so that when I tried to pay the ticket, they told me there wasn’t one to pay, in person, at the courthouse.) So I was just a tad Eor’y when I set out this morning. Which, hilariously enough, if you total that sum with other ticket fines this year, could total up to as much as 1/6 my total annual gross income. Impressive, I know. It was, just… a tough blow, but one that must be endured, just the same).
But, when I start looking around at the classics - I do so love the classics - it is a lot like grocery shopping while high. So, I started scrolling through the unread titles with that gentle fondness, the sweet slow memories of the other great works that, when you read them, seemed they chronicled your life; there was your life before you read them, and then there was your life after - new eyes. I saw a copy of My Antonia, by Willa Cather, sort of tucked away. So, I grabbed it, and when I did, I noticed that it was misshapen. The book had just been cut wrong through the press. The top edge had a sharp incline running away, upward, from the binding, waaay off square. In truth, I’ve never seen a book this awkward looking ever make it to the shelves. I thought, maybe all of them are this way. But I checked the other copies and they were all as square as they were supposed to be. And so, immediately, like any silly-old-boy, I wanted that book. I wanted it because it was broken. I wanted it because it was imperfect, flawed, and seemed like the way a little boy in a cartoon might find the book he was supposed to find, the one that might save him. It’s silly, and ridiculous, I know, I know. But it isn’t important that it’s silly or ridiculous. It’s important that something can cause that feeling, and that you can let that feeling happen… and not feel silly or ridiculous, just lucky, i guess.
Things like that fill my head with all of the thoughts that I like. I went to sit down and preview the book, and my attention span did what it does after ten pages, and it took the feeling of what I was reading and connected it to my stare out the window. The leaves were tumbling, and then I thought to myself, “leaves are always tumbling. People always say they’re doing that. Think of something better.” And there were a lot of leaves tumbling, so I thought of gymnasium full of little children tumbling and doing different things at different corners of the building, just like the leaves were all doing their own different things at different corners of the parking lot. And I smiled, and thought it was silly, but I smiled anyway. The book is set in the West, and thought I’ve been there often enough, I always consider there being only The South, my home, old Dixie - and then there is this North, which is, I consider, at best a social hemisphere, and at worst bleak, and cold. My country, to me, is viewed as a few booming metropolises scattered to the four winds. There is that large chunk at the very southernmost tip, where people are weathered and proud, and that large state to the very tip of the west where the dreamers once went, and many hurried back to wherever they came from, and where they insist upon the delusion that their college football teams are as good as ours, but they never will be ( ;-) to you SoCal girls if you’re reading this). I bought it, the book, of course, and re-bought a copy of The Beautiful and the Damned, and a copy of David Copperfield, which I have not read because I’ve always been kind of pissed that Dickens was paid by the page, and so was inclined to be garrulous and long-winded. I bought them, and then I drove back, and sat in the car when I got there to listen to the end of a song, Telepath, by The Church. There are these whirling starry guitar parts at the end of that song, like you didn’t know it, but it’s setting you back down on the ground, and retreating back from whence it came. And the red leaves were just swirling swirling everywhere. One flew in my window before I finished my cigarette, and flicked it. And I suppose I just wanted to write all that because I haven’t in a while. It isn’t much, but it’s only the tale of a half-morning anyway.
It’s 8:30am. I slid my time-card through the digital punch-in-out box about an hour ago. Work went slow, grinding through the hours at first, until I had a couple of cups of coffee around 3 or 4, and then my slow soggy thoughts started to sparkle, and the rest of the night I was a veeery good employee. I’m unwinding now, watching a movie, and all of the characters in it are having good times, like, crazygonutz. And now, before I even get to sleep, I can feel the weekend, that Mr. Hyde crouched ready to surge into my veins, like it does every weekend. At the beginning of every week, I am wise, repentant, able to reform, to learn from the terribly recent mistakes. My Mondays, of late, are mournful. My Sundays are nearly Somnambulatory. But my Fridays and Saturdays are my solemn consistent attempts at a new manner to fly gracefully, yes, but not too close to the sun, as has become the habit. All is well, and I feel I have a fine view of all that can be seen perfectly, for a little while. It seems that discretion has been met, and I close my eyes to the setting of a guest room, or couch… and I wake up on the ground… metaphorically, that is. True, this isn’t every occasion. I am well-behaved enough when I hang out with certain circles, the Marrieds or the Sophisticates. Oh, but there are so many circles, and with certain activities I am eternally DOOMED! Let me run a few of these down for you: College Football - Georgia wins = Happy Fail. There will be too many toasts to turn down… and I’ll lead a lion’s share of them. Georgia loses = saaad fail. And I’ll likely bet you that you can bet against me and earn a respectable living, as a gambler with a lucky horse. Dancing: win/lose. This is about as charming a time as you’re like to find me. Indeed, I am likely having suuuuch a good time, I might seek you out, and insist that you share in this “last glorious night of our lives,” together. And I get distracted, and forget to do things like “eat,” or other sensible alternatives, like, “going to bed.”
“Alright, I’m going to bed,” one says, wisely.
“Me?! Oh, no, I couldn’t… not possibly.”
“Goodnight, then,” says my wise friend. Bedroom door closes.
Then, Me: [whips out cellphone, and begins calling everyone else in the general proximity].
Curious text messages can be found the next morning, often enough. A few weekends ago, I found one that read, “Now. nownownowNOW,” like some child demanding his toy. It was supposed to go to my younger sister - we banter back and forth during Bulldog games, when we are not watching them together, and this text was made as an attempt to share the moment, THE crucial moment, where Georgia must score, or lose. (We didn’t score then, if I recall. But, then, we did… but so did they, and the bastards edged us for the second year in a row). The text conversation ended between the two of us in “fuck,” and “aww. hurts.” Anyway, BUT, my childish-sounding text went to, not my sister, but a girl I had been amiably texting throughout the afternoon. I did my best to explain the situation to the woman involved - I was red-faced, to be sure - and she responded, “It’s ok. I don’t ask questions anymore. I just accept your weirdness.” I sat and looked at that, wondering how I ought to take it. Then, I regained all dignity (all that could be summoned) and decorum of speech, and blubbered back something to the tune of, “Thank you. It is sweet of you to overlook such foolishness,” somewhat sheepishly. I have to be sheepish sometimes, or I think I would be dead, at the hands of possibly a rougher roughian, or certainly in jail if I couldn’t run with truly surprising speed, and think up a lie quick as a fox.
But, again, dear reader, if I didn’t make it clear earlier, everything begins in elegance. Truly, it does. When I leave the house, I am clean and pressed, and polished as well as one can be. I think I am taller on weekends… I am sure that I walk as such. Just last weekend I attended a wedding that began at 12:30pm. - Trouble, right from the start!! I requested “Bizarre Love Triangle,” and it was the only song I danced to. So far, so good. Then, we well-dressed rascals, off to a bar. Then, somebody ordered a tray of chicken nuggets from chick-fil-a, and hurried to leave and bring that tray to a gathering at a friend’s house where we could watch the boxing match. *my man lost, and it was controversial, to boot.* When we arrived, I saw those people that lived there had on their comfortable house clothes. I was jealous. So, I grabbed a somewhat wrinkled, lightly - well, maybe more - ensemble from the trunk of my car. When I went back inside, feeling free, I was the momentary joke of the oh-so-damn-funny maryjanes out back. “Matt…” I walked around to them, “…WHAT HAPPENED?!! Are you ok?! And then they fell to pieces about it. It was a bit funny, though. The emblem on your shirt does not account for the point that you look as if someone through you in a dumpster… and you decided to have a roll-about in it. I laughed along.
So, here we are again, Weekend? What’ll it be? There’s a concert, an all-day affair, Saturday. I don’t have tickets to it now, but when I wake, I may. There’s a bid in the air. Or, do you have something special in mind?
… And the bravery begins to bubble anew.
Bring it on, bitch! I shake my fist at you!!!
To be honest, it really isn’t anything. I just felt like throwing something out there, about writing… what it should do, what works for me, and why. It’s just a lightly tossed line, like a basketball thrown backward, towards somewhere you think the net is.
I read what people write on this little digital diary, this nice little notepad we all share, and I read some lines that shift my soul all around - flip my heart like a hotcake. And, if you’ve done that, I’ve likely let you know by showing some interest in that connection - suddenly, I’m SO glad you’re out there, and I want you to know it, and I want you to feel rewarded by the point that I am discerning on such issues. I’m so lucky to know some of you well, (and some really pretty girls in there, too. And, talent?- psht, enough to act like they don’t even care ;)). Sometimes I feel that hand in the dark, and I’m so glad I’m not alone. But, then, there are sometimes where I just think, (and don’t any of you go getting all upset. We writers… we are so damned touchy, always… can’t tell us a thing - Can’t tell us a cow’s horns are crooked ;))
“I don’t care. No one cares. I don’t want to know how you feel.” You felt “lonely,” you felt “sad,?” The only thing worse than those worn passages are the pointy-worded Thesauruses that rake their vocabularies across your ears. I want you to tell me how I feel, and I don’t think in too too many syllables… not anymore. They are there, the syllables, and I’ll use them on occasion, but not to speak of how something really is. Icing. It is mere icing. If all of your syllables cannot make a melody, they sure as hell don’t mean a damn to me.
That’s why I read. Veritas! I want you to tell me what I’ve always known, what I’ve always felt. I want you to articulate the wonderings I can’t. Help me… Jesus, Help me!! “Show me fear in a handful of dust.” I have a cryptic stenographer that stands with a hammer and chisel at the walls of my heart, and his eyes gleam only for the moment he hears the words he knows are already on the inside of that heart, and he longs only to engrave those eternal affirmations on the outside, where they were always meant to be. I know (from that upbringing I’ve mentioned) that it is written, “The words of God are written on the hearts of men.” I can tell you that the words “So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past” are also written there. They are there as if they shone in light upon the back of my eyelids, and more, sooo many more. I know them when I hear them, and I am never mistaken.
I want a prophet, someone who’s watched the whole roulette game of life played through, and can tell me which bullet already has my blood stained on the tip of it. There are such mellifluous sorcerers, my emotional exorcists. I’d like to say that I’m in a fever to find you, and indeed I used to be. But now I know that I’ll likely trip right over you. It is written. And I can walk dizzy, and blindfolded, and close my eyes, and stop my ears, and chant lalalalalalala, I know that which I need will find my senses somehow. “Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission and for my sins, they gave me one.” “The horror. The horror.”
And, now, after writing this, I know I’ve gone too far. Because I love to know how those people, who are my friends, who I “follow” on this, how they feel about their days. It makes me feel close to them, when I’m not in real proximity. And, now, I’ll also admit that perhaps I was just feeling a bit agitated myself. You see, I’m on a sort of family vacation, New Smyrna Beach - it’s just north of Miami, i think - and I’ve been the only one up for hours. I found some trouble a few hours ago. There was some fight, and I believe it involved a few strippers and a missing handbag. Anyway, there were lots of cop cars, and I got to go stand around and talk with all the other speculating storytellers on the sidelines. But that died down, and we all had to leave, and I came up here and started writing this. It’s an awful mean thing. I’m not a mean person. Suppose I’ll hit post on this, and then probably delete it tomorrow. Guess I’ll get some sleep, and wake up to cheer on the women of the US world cup team in their match versus Brazil! I was right sad that Germany lost today. Ah, well.
My grandmother sometimes uses parables, in the style of Jesus, to get across her points to me. I, her grandson, am one of those vestiges of her life, one of her ambitions, quivering embers of lost dreams. And her advice is, to me, like one of those quilts knitted by the elderly so that part of what is her love will always keep her dear ones warm. In these endeavors she is merciless, and does not tire, and will succeed. It is like the iron backbone in that 5 foot frame will shoulder a weight with such seemingly superhuman strength you would be shamed to not do the same yourself when she passes you the stone, as if it were a feather. The furthering of the Fussell name is among the most sacred of her loves. It sounds comical, something from that smooth atavistic antebellum that lingers from a time, that may be gone with the wind, but the wind is still here. It has not left. It is still here, swirling about, and will never be gone nor forgotten as long as it does what it does with our hair, and cuts through rocks too big to be moved with men and ropes. I do more than indulge; I sit quiet, and I listen. I listen for some of that colloquial jazz to fly out. Sometimes insecurities and idiosyncrasies bleed through the conversation, and tell you everything. I listen for those involuntary vernacular tells, and when they appear, shining and rare like gems, I feel like a lucky prospector, and I ease in my chair for the cherished moment. Sometimes I think the old storytellers could make the hands on the clock stop all commerce just to hear what was to be said, and truly stop time.
One of my favorites is when once we argued over something, probably having to do with moral fiber, and she told me, “Matthew, you just don’t believe a cow’s horns are crooked!” Cows horns are, of course, undeniably crooked. Thus, she gave in rhetoric as simple as 2+2, a way of saying, “what I say is true, and you can believe it, and be right with me, or you can disagree, and be hopelessly wrong.”
Lately, another one has been rattling around upstairs, making me smirk to myself when i think of it, and think of how she tells it. It’s the story of a man, who, while hiking at the top of a mountain, comes across a snake. The snake can’t move, because the top of the mountain is too cold for him, and he begs the man to take him down to the bottom, where it is warmer, so he can move about. The man doesn’t expect to be taken so easily. “Why should I take you down to where you can move? Once I get you down, you’ll bite me!!” The snake says, “Oh, no… I promise I won’t.” So, the man accepts the snake’s promise, and starts carrying him down. Once, the pair get almost to the bottom, the snake begins to regain his mobility, and having it, he uses it to bite the man who saved him and brought him down. The man asks, “Why did you bite me!? You promised you wouldn’t, and I saved your life!!!” The snake just looks at him and says, “Well…I’m a snake.” (There’s an even better version where the scorpion begs passage from a frog across a lake. And when that pair get near the other shore, the scorpion stings the poor frog right on the head, sinks his own boat, and they both drown. So senseless.)
I think of these stories when I think of the women in my life, and why it is I keep such poisonous company. “Coochie-coochie-coo, my dear black widow spider. You will never bite the one who loves you so.Oh, you do, true, have legs for days, and eyes, a bundle, just for me!”
Speaking of spider webs, i guess that brings us to the story intended. (I don’t give a damn much if i rattle or ramble a bit before we begin). The story includes that germ of thought, and that 5 foot frame, and it’s true, too… though I’m almost ashamed to begin.I’ll start right at the tail of a night filled with liquorish cocktails I’ve long sworn off, and darling professions of love and faith over cigarette, a few years ago…
(I’ll try and get really started this week, if I think i’ve got it)
Life feels better after a manicure and a pedicure.
Somehow, marriage doesn’t seem so drab with this dynamic duo! BLING BLAM!!
“My dear,
The creative adult is the child who survived.
The creative adult is the child who survived after the world tried killing them, making them ‘grown up’. The creative adult is the child who survived the blandness of schooling, the unhelpful words of bad teachers, and the nay-saying ways of the world.
The creative adult is in essence simply that, a child.
Truly yours,
Ursula LeGuin”More: Writing Inspiration
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Last night I had the dream of Athens, dreams of the wild hell-be-damned dance nights, and the liberation, and the libations/lubrications, of all of our souls. Get out there, get electric… pulse… groove, jump, let it all go, smooth through the night like fingers through cat’s fur. Those were the autumnal living room carnivals, where we held our dreams for the night arm-in-arm ‘til daybreak, (WHO are the Champions!?), and then to the Beyond, to the the brink of well-earned exhaustion! We’re gonna jump and be alive, and devil take the hindmost, or who’s closest to the ground… if the old sinister fellow has a trick to catch one that stayed too low to the floor because they were afraid of heights (or whatever - some things restrain the flighty hopes of the the soaring visionaries). But that’s fine, because I flew, I knew I did, and I flew high. And the rest of us knew just where, and the clock was an irrelevant ghost, brought only by the sun, that didn’t matter. And how I grabbed your cheeks and pulled you in close to make that face that turned the past to dust and that electric violet flickered like a cool fevered heaven. And how do you describe to someone who hasn’t been there, what it’s like to know that you are in the living-room of a castle in the sky, how it may shift when the crowd has to move to one end of the carpet to support that One who dares to attempt the Dirty Dancing Lift!? Whatever braincells died were sweet deaths, and they made their sparkling departure like burning roman candles, burning in the tales of stars, and the heavens are where we drift hazily, and never hit the ground. We simply wake up. And then one morning, we wake up again, and realize we were part of something dying people wish for - a memory like this. Oh, let me have that carpet forever beneath my sock’d feet, and could the girls’ hair always be at that jerk’d extension of fevered shock!! We died forever, and lived the forfeit of a night (I don’t know what the fuck that means either, but I can’t look back. I never did then (and it was a bad, necessary habit to develop), and I never want to). Those were the ends that I’ll hope I relive forever - the flickers of all that I want to be my Whole. And when they say, “What dreams may come,” I shall hope to be there again - simply moving to a rhythm in a way that felt right. Who could ever regret that?
Phew, I’d love to go back and correct my grammar, but I just can’t. Deal.
It’s 3am, and all is… something, or something or other. Sometimes your head isn’t the thing that swims, and it’s your chest that gurgles like a wet sponge, and murmurs all of those possibilities that your head can’t wrap itself around yet. And you have to breathe every damn breath around all of that. And it’s hard, and the top of breath feels like the bottom all of the time, and the flipped coins all land on the dark side, and the possibilities of love and misery are wrapped in some diaphanous horizon of scarlet and purple. You have to breathe all of that down into the sponge, someplace you can’t see, that gurgles.
The muggy twilights have returned to this my rolling green Dixieland, and I’ve met them with some mixed emotion. This was the True Morning of my youth… all of the other hours were dreary things we stayed awake through to get to to this, this beginning! All of the cars would pull up to the curb of whatever front yard we were standing in, and the evening would take shape just as the twilit verdure shaded slowly, and the air felt hollow and warm. I remember that so well. The air was hollow! The way that it feels when I reach back for it, feels like those times we walked around unmarked graveyards. Suddenly, you are in a snow globe. You don’t know it at the time, but when you feel back over the memories, you look for an eye you knew must’ve been watching you. But where was it? Where, was the eye!?
I’ve been thinking about The Sponge, and the Eye, and the copper-tasting throat, and all of the while I keep wondering “Should I tell her that I love her, before I go away?” Maybe I should head west, or South, yes, farther South. I’ll sink into it - Savannah. I once sailed by a fort in a riverboat there… so slow, sooo sloow… and it was beautiful. I’ll have to get a white suit, to be sure! And, I think I may shave my mustache - I don’t think I can make it through this summer with it. If I could only come into a bit of money, it would certainly be easier. Is the itch to write a few tales there, and will it wait? I don’t know. There sure are a lot of clanging noises in this room tonight.
I haven’t written in this thing for weeks, or has it been over a month? There was only the most sudden needle prick tinge to do so. I haven’t felt like writing a thing lately. The stories are all pidgin-holed, and silent, and not at all a’beggin’ to be told. That’s nice sometimes - quiet. They were howling like hound dogs in your neighbor’s yard not too long ago. But, the hound dogs, you know that after you’ve swore at them, at got them all still and silent, they haven’t really gone to sleep, and they’ll start up again once you get to sleep. So, I never really worry too much about dry spells. I only know I wanted to get out a bag of words like an infant does blocks, and throw them on the floor and play with them awhile.
