Thursday, November 21, 2013

Knocking



The honest answer is that I didn’t want anything to be put above that, and was a bit scared of looking at it again. The more honest answer is that I’m lazy and flippant about my writing; more prone to staring at the ceiling and licking toads then working my craft and kicking-ass. The even more honest answer is some savage blend of the truth of those two that I neither have the ability to overcome nor the heart to reconcile. Fuck off on both counts if you have in mind to do it for me.

It’s brutal, what’s below this, as open as I’ll ever be about the places my life as been, as open as the window needs to be. As sad as life will ever be: dusty emergency lights in a building that is slowly burning to the ground.

One, two, three, four. That’s the numbers of stories that I published on the Long Sunset in 2013. And I never meant for it to be this way; for things to come with a cloud and question mark, each piece of writing its own insignia of the tightening your skin feels at the distant thunder of a rising tide. But then, I never had any choice in that matter, to some degree. Most importantly, to longtime readers, and myself, as matter of arching storyline, it had become a tragedy of translucent being. A place that no longer was a tree- house. And that’s fine, this place deserved and afforded everything that came its way, maybe it was even built for it, maybe it continues to do so, maybe I’ll always run from what it can be.

And again, probably I’m just lazy. And also, maybe I just get paid to write now, and like the plumber (which an old, sad, tired writer once related the profession to me as), doesn’t clean the pipes in his own house after work. Not that I work as writer for a living, or even come close, but generally, when I do write, I end up getting paid for it. I’m not sure myself what this means in the grand picture.

And I’m not sure what I’m trying to tell you. I used to write a column of some length every time I had failed to write a column of some length, and I felt the need to explain myself, to explain my lack of production. Perhaps I still do, but on a different scale.

I’m not sure what it is I can still write here. I’m not playful anymore, not animated and illustratively rough, and certainly not whole of heart. I started the Long Sunset when I was 21 years old (I think, all times approximate), and it spread and weaved and was printed in places I never thought it would. For a time, it was my mirror, the free legacy that I could make of myself and my words, but 8 years is a lot of time, and whatever it was I thought I created in candlelit nights in the center of this state those years ago is more difficult for me to carry on now. Or, at least, to do so consistently, to create stories, to live them, in this format, is harder and more distant.

Not that I’m tired of stories. It’s all I have, and all I do. And I have plenty of them, and all day, and all night, I look for more. It just may take me a while to remember how to tell them.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home