day one.

I have always liked the idea of writing but not necessarily the discipline of it. I used to live by the light of inspiration: wine or whiskey mixed with sex, the look of my son when before he hugs me goodnight, the feel of street as you stand outside and drag and look up at the lights in other people’s windows. The feeling you get before you lose yourself and all your capacities to administer self-control. What little I have, that is.

I am a sucker for this juice. I live for it. But I feel worn down, broken even in my dead pursuits. These stories or songs or languages that used to feel so much a part of me have suddenly become nostalgic glimmers of another era. Do you know the feeling? It’s not as if you have died, but as if a part of you has. But that part of you has not. It’s a long winter in your bones, a silent season. But the fear overwhelms you that the silence is there, forever. There are no more broken hearts, no more fearless, reckless thoughts. Just strategic, foreseeable ends. But there are and you are too weak to look for them; too childish to think like you should.

The time you need. The space. The desk you want but may never have. The walls and the ceiling, the window with the view of that thing. No Jupiter, no moon, no night-train melodies or characters from the street that used to light your mind. Or at least they did for that season. What do you do with what you have? What do you care about what others think of you? What do you do with what you are and what time you have here on this earth? What is the muse and what good is a muse if it flees? What good are you if your dependencies are so insufferable – so needy you are.

challenge initiated.

Challenge. Write something, anything, each day for 365 days. It doesn’t matter what it is. Sometimes a sentence is the hardest thing. And don’t write for anyone or anything. Just write. Don’t edit, don’t delete, don’t censor. Whatever comes out you post and let it live, die, suffocate, embarrass, whatever.

I’ve thought about doing this, even attempted it before. But I feel like if I don’t do this now, I never will. I’ll post everything here, not for you or anyone else but me.

The exercise begins tonight. I’ve decided this and concluded there is no good start date. No good beginning. No inspiring light in the mind or heart or soul. Just the day. November 20, 2009. The day I decided to do this.

demolition.

I worked the tiles up from the wall
Cracked ceramic pieces wrecked from their grouted grid
Dust of plaster and splintered wood,
Circuit the edging of this old bathroom floor
Demolition begins in the break of one piece
One hole, one rip, one tear
In the mind of good intentions
In a space beyond repair.

rebellion signs.

"Better to die on one's feet than live on one's knees" -Albert Camus

The book is tucked in my laptop bag. The bag that sums up all the dulled boredom that surrounds most of the work day and all that comes with working to survive and provide. But this book is different. I don't read many books like I used to before being a dad and all the things that have come to occupy most of my time. Anyway. no excuses, I just don't read like I should. I've fallen out with much of the interests that used to pervade the old nightstand or desk. Books begin to become tomes or monuments to periods of my life. I can look out onto the shelves and think back to what each one said or the role it played in my life at the time.

The absence of time is unmarked. This is why I think time seems to have sped up. I'm simultaneously here and there. Books must do this to us all.

I picked up Camus' The Rebel a couple of weeks ago. I'm a slow and deliberate reader. But I like my reading style. I used to envy speedy readers because of my own tortoise eyes, but I have begun to appreciate it about myself. One sentence is all you really need.

When I was in college I fell in love with Camus and Kafka. I still confuse their work to this day. I am sad that I didn't pick this book up ten years ago. It would have helped with a lot of stuff. Or maybe that's just bologna. Whatever, you get a book when you get it and there's a time for it. I like to think that I still think somewhat naively about life. I like to think that I am still alive because I am still rebelling. If you do not rebel, you will surely die.

"...But the Church condemned this attempt and, by condemning it, swelled the ranks of the rebels."

october swoon.

A photo I recently saw: A woman and a girl, into some far off unknown world, their voyage caught like a sleepy dream in chromatic gloss. The girl is asleep, the mom awake and staring out at some unseen point of interest. Like the mother’s own thoughts have overwhelmed the superficial realities around her. There seems to be a lot of courage in her expression, but you sense the loneliness and quiet sadness.

There is a point in autumn where things go from beautiful and melancholic to sad, gray and cold. The feeling you get when you awake and your nose is cold or when you step out of the shower and quickly wrap your shoulders in the towel. How you wish you were back in bed.

Older – I’m older and she’s older, he’s older too. All of my friends keep getting older and those points of our friendship-origins continue to fall backwards into the past. I have decided that the age I am now is the age when people become and stay who they are. Or at least this is true for me. God whoever God is mysterious and strange and simultaneously anything we want him or her to be. God is a seagull diving into the ocean shore or the look your first born gives you just before he goes down to sleep; the sound of his snore that reminds you of the woman beside you. God inside you and around you; God deserting you; God is the bar where people meet and drink themselves into the oblivion of God and thoughts they don’t want or maybe really want to have or maybe want to deny they want to have. I don’t know what God is and I do. I’m thirty-two not twenty-one, I’m asleep on the wave that keeps rolling; awake on the ceiling of last night’s dream that I can’t stop thinking about. I’m cursing the Christ and begging him to appear. I am Buddha in the twilight lifting nightcaps to the people I love and singing praises to the undone man I have become. Light a lamp for me for you and for all the lost ones. We came and thought we were steadied hands. Why do all things lead me back to the empty galaxy and the waning moon?

the desk.

This desk does not feel right. It has yet to figure itself out. I have yet to make it a place of comfort and resolution for my mind and drunken way-faring episodes lost on the milky weekend evenings. The kind where after I have indulged my brain with a few glasses I will prance out into the darkness looking for God or anyone that I think I used to know and still know but lost in some pebbly forever, in what I feel like I have disowned in some silent forgetfulness.

I have been thinking lately a lot about apostasy and what it means to desert the thing or person you used to stand for. I wonder if anyone truly can commit the act of apostasy. I mean, if you believe something at some point, no matter what your lot in life, it becomes a part of you or maybe even all of you; your core being. I try to run from this thing but it has taken on a shape of me; a silhouette of me wherever I go.

I do not think I have committed apostasy, but I do think I see this fear or even self-acknowledged apostasy in others and think that it is a truer act of faith than the static faith I see in myself.

It’s turning to fall here in the northeastern part of my country ‘Tis of thee. Sweet land of desperation where it is so difficult to communicate with anyone that doesn’t line-up on your side of the political line – I’m a leftist Commi – she’s a right wing bigot. Let’s let Rush Limbaugh be dead tonight.When I was younger I thought of my father as a kind of golden hair god-like guy. I got older and he got older and I realized after he died that he was just a coward. I never understood this until now. I still don’t completely. But whenever I feel somewhat of coward, no matter what end, I feel a part of him touching me. The hard part is when I feel the goodness I remember of him in weird things like the way my son gazes upward at the sky or like when I sit on the rocking chair with my boy and smell his hair. I remember things of my dad like that. I wonder if I am a coward. I wonder how long my days are on earth. I wonder how much of a man feels always simultaneously like a coward. Like just moving forward is a falling always and forever forward.

I wonder often why in the hell there is this awful desire to record things and write things down. Or type things in. I mean, I will drink myself silly just to let things out. Why is that? Do you feel this way? Like the night is a shortening chapter on the shortest blinking screen ever? Like if you don’t get things down now, you may never and this is all you were intended for? Sounds pretentious or just plain stupid, I don’t know, but it is what it is. Writing things is like putting up a cell wall. You write to surrender but also to be arrested, judged and ultimately, hung.

two years.

The house was quiet after mommy left for work and you were asleep. The upstairs hallway was cool and bright from the morning sun. I opened your door subtly as I usually do in the morning when I think you may still be sleeping. Though the doorknob sticks and squeaks as it turns back. You do not wake, still. You have always been a good sleeper.

You were on your left side. You’ve outgrown your brown blanket, the one that you’ve grown attached to since you first came home with us. The blanket you refer to as “bankit.” You’ll ask for it once again when I lift you from your bed to change you. I’ll place it on my shoulder for you to lay your head on for a moment before I’ll put it back into your bed.

As you’ve grown, I’ve started to see a lot of your mother in your face and expression. The way you roll your eyes, your patent laugh, your precocious, unassuming determination. I see her in the way you say “no.” I feel her hand in yours as we walk down the stairs together.

It’s in the few times that I observe you sleeping that I see part of me in you. I see it in how you sleep, sprawled out with your feet out from underneath the blankets. Your right arm up and left arm back. Even your sleeping scent is familiar to me.

I remember the first time I met you; you were in that hospital room all by yourself. You had those gadgets linked up to you, beeping screens monitoring your unique anatomy. God gave you a heart like no other is what I used to tell you when you were still inside mommy. It was a bright sunny day like today. The window in the room allowed a lot of light into the room. You lay on the bed, your name written out in colored markers above you, new and hallucinatory. I approached your bed station with a sense of fear. I remember wishing mommy was able to meet you too with me right now. I still wish for that sometimes when I think back on those first few days of you.

I held your tiny hand knowing that that would be the only time I would see you as you first were. I remember touching your chest and head. Your tiny fingers so incredibly tiny around my finger. Your sleepy breathing like feathery whispers. Your head conical. Is this my son? I remember the ultimate, simultaneous rush of disbelief and certainty. That you were here with me now, in plain view. After months of anxious deliberation and trepidation you were here. All I wanted was to hold you and bring you to mommy. How amazing it was to have you here with us finally.

You turn two today. You know now how to say two when I ask you your age. The bunny ears raised from your fingers, you exclaim toooo! as I prepare your breakfast. I don’t know how we got here so quickly when in many ways, I think we are still sitting there with you in that hospital. Waiting for the news you will be released and joined with us. You are and I remember this now. Yes, Sullivan, that’s right. Two.