[Found this ~unpublished~ post originally from 22 April 2010 while peering behind the curtain. Bumping it up]

 

I am a new day rising
I'm a brand new sky
To hang the stars upon tonight
I am a little divided
Do I stay or run away
And leave it all behind?*

*Times Like These, Foo Fighters

Oh, can I tell the universe how much I love certain music?

I've read recently that as a(n aspiring) writer, I should be this observer who reports life, 'real' life. That the urge to write is like an alien springing from my chest -- okay, my words, not 'theirs' -- and while it's spilling it's afterbirth all over the dinner table, I have to get it down on paper. That the world needs what I have to say. That a writer is someone who LIVES and tells about it.

Like Terrence Mann, heading off into the mystic corn field, "I'll write about it; it's what I do."

But when I look back on my whole entire life -- and there seems to be a whole lot of it, at this point -- I haven't so much as lived and told, as listened and lived. I mean through music. Like the songs are the blood running in my veins. I don't think I can say what I'm feeling. Maybe it's as pathetic as I am never really living unless I'm listening to music. Losing myself in it.

When I filled out my profile for NaNoWriMo this past November, I listed under 'Favorite Authors' Trent Reznor's name. I chewed my thumb nail over it, even. Because, I mean how tragically hip, right? How 'cool' and 'edgy' to list arguably one of the most influential artists on the alternative/ industrial/ rock/ dance(?) music industry as a 'favorite author'. Seems calculated to get my a$$ kicked in the schoolyard, really.

The only way to be truly honest was to list his name, though.

On the way home from running something up to my daughter's school, I heard Foo Fighter's song Times Like These, and sat in the garage until the song finished up. Thinking about my love for Foo Fighters, and NiN, and Boston, and Yes and Mute Math, and Weezer, and Squeeze and Keane, and Airborne Toxic Event... Of how my innermost self is expressed through the music that I love... How they seem to be speaking inside, through, out from me, all at the same time. And I'm aware that every single thing I want to say has already been said and so much better, too, through the music that my insides respond to.

And yet, I still feel this damning urge, this grotesque twisting need, this consuming inferno of want to... tell.

I feel damned, in a way. Wanting so badly to write and sitting down staring at a blank screen for 45 minutes before I finally give up and curl into a ball, picking my eyebrows out and chewing my hair.* I'm not unlike that dude in the old Twilight Zone episode who finds himself the only one alive with mountains of books around him and 'all the time in the world, finally, to read'... And then his glasses fall and smash. Or like a woman who, after nine months, feels an overwhelming urge to 'PUSH'... only to discover that her pregnancy was hysterical, and there's nothing to push out.

I'm going out of my mind, with the need, but there is nothing, nothing, nothing there. It's impotent rage, hopeless belief; it's being all wound up and no ball to pitch... It's the worst kind of hell and for what? To do something I learned to do in first grade? Put the pencil to the paper and make the letters. Or high school -- put your left hand on 'a,s,d,f' and your right hand on 'j,k,l,;' and tippity-tap. And I run screaming from it. Because I know. I KNOW I am a spindly vacuum with a loose lid. A black hole, supermassive in my infinitesimal -ness.

If I was just, or decent, or any kind of a philanthropist or humanitarian, I'd crunch this up and toss it in the dustbin give myself the same permission I give other humans: the space to fail and do it again, and again, and again...

Driving Miss Crazy

My mother owned the road. When she perched in the driver's seat, every other driver on the road, in deference, parted their vehicles in two undulating lines to the left and right of her path. She sailed, swan on placid water, through the line unassailed to her destination, where she landed gently, slid the shifter gracefully through prindle and descended from her coach in a cloud of beatific satisfaction.

At least in her mind.

My experience, as her shotgun passenger, resonated differently. Her majesty was not pleased with the subjects occupying 'her' road, and made her displeasure quite known. Her tone of voice, her mode of expression, her posture all signified livid, unmitigated aggression towards her fellow travellers. I learned the rankest cuss words, not from my peers in the schoolyard, but right there, shotgun passenger seat to my mother's road rage. I experienced my first one-fingered salute, not from a loosely cobbled gathering of disaffected youth or a peace protest or a rock concert, but right there, sitting next to my mother as she navigated her personal Mad Max-ian pot-holed hell.

She always felt, I think, she'd been born to a chauffered car, but found herself saddled with the soccer mom duties of the mere plebiscite.

You know that queer mix of embarrassment and superiority every kid eventually feels about their parent? I'd get acute pangs of it toward my mother's wild gesticulations and loud profanities while pressed into piloting the family sedan. I guess I was shocked by the realization that my mother, from whom I'd learned the bedrock principles of 'Right and Wrong,' turned out to be as much of a fraud as I at the 'actions speaking louder than the words' thing. It informed the very beginnings of my foundational mistrust in all authority. Poor mom. Probably had no inkling she was shaping a closet anarchist.

My mother's dead lo these almost seventeen years; her impotent wheelian rages stifled, blanketed by the softening of almost two decades of inactivity. She went -- maybe not gently, but certainly -- into that good night where no one impedes her progress on the road by driving too slowly, or too fast, or erratically or by not using their %$##^#$% blinker! I suspect her drivetime plays like Singin' in the Rain instead of Beyond Thunderdome, now. In short, she is at peace, finally, behind the wheel.

But sometimes, usually when I'm behind the wheel, oddly enough, I'll hear it. That string of profanities and wild ravings; I'll see in my peripherals the surreptitious hand ...uh... signals. I'll feel the faint recognition in my spine, the slow slide down into the seat for concealment, the complex embarrassment mixed with equal parts superiority... the recognition of The Drive down Her Road. I'll think to myself "Mother!"

And I realize, with a growing sense of shame tinged with the vaguest beginnings of forgiveness... I am just like my mom.

Desert dry

Still reading. Not much writing at all. Trying to figure out if I'm meant to be an author, or a writer.

To me, an author implies commercial success -- however modest. Anyone can "be a writer". You need only write every day. (So, as of right now, I'm not even a writer.)

Right now, I'm reading Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. Although written in the mid-90's, the advice is resonant and I'm getting a great deal from the instruction. Mostly reaffirming what I learned from other books on writing, but with Lamott's own unique voice supplying. I think I'd enjoy studying under her -- she seems very organic.

I'm already pretty whimsical in my writing pursuits. If 'the spirit doesn't move' then neither does my pen. If I'm not feeling it, I don't even glance at the laptop. What I need is to harness that wayward childishness and learn to channel it into a daily practice.

Easier said than done.