Wednesday, September 07, 2011

In Seven Years

"The hardest part for me, with language and making, is the first step of spilling ink onto a clean pale page. It's a metaphor, you dig? It's about taking the first step, hoping the rest will follow with momentum towards a certain velocity. The plunge? The risk? All of that contrite crap about self confidence and taking risks, gotta spend money to make money. Reverse that; I just hate introductions.

Set the stage, make the bed, first impressions, books and covers, love at first bite. This is real folks, no rehearsals, you have waited all this time and honing your craft, let it shine. Not time off for performance anxiety. Gotta be a verse factory to succeed. Eat nothing but post-modernism, breathe and shit pure literary gold.

This whole journal thing was supposed to fix that, supposed to put a priority on the stuff, a spotlight on a perfect little hobby that I could focus down into a tight beam of excellence."


It all started in a fervor; one day a few sentences to broadcast a lonesome heart that would be further bundled up in social anxiety as the months tick by. The next year another disparate lover might quench or begin another cycle of loathing and scathing paragraphs. One year it was about the strength of surviving cancer, and the next year it was about mulling the hot streets of Mexico. It's a nice little journal that speaks nothing. It's a couple hundred short stories that belong condensed in some foul after-dinner mint. It has all been and jumble and a ramble. It had days when it made me feel stronger, when I took it like a serious thing, and it was my megaphone on the mount; and I screamed curses at the damned. Then it became a thin paper tacked to a door that said "Lunch at Noon".