Well it's easy when you don't know better
You think it's sleazy?
Then put it in a short letter
---The White Stripes, "The Hardest Button To Button"
Three days ago I had a (relative) head of hair and a beard.
Yesterday I had a head of hair.
Today, I’ve got a clean-shaven face and a bald pate.
It’s pretty easy to tell when I’m in an epochal mood: just check out the State of the Follicle. At the beginning of the month, I let the whole hair thing go to hell, since I was ensconced in 55+ hour work weeks. Just easier to shave a bit than the whole thing. Get to work. Go go go. Work work work. Order in dinner on the company, take a cab home, collapse. Rinse, wash, repeat.
In the middle of all that, other things were happening around me as well. Not very fun things. Friendships strained. Relationships severed. Sundays spent in a hospital room with my father after his operation.
All a blur, really. Hard to believe that Labor Day wasn’t yesterday. Been 30 really, really odd days. The best thing I can say about them is that, in hindsight, they went by faster than any other 30 in recent memory. I think that’s what happens when your goals revolve around meals… “Just gotta get to lunch…” or “A few more hours, then dinner”. You spend your life in 5-hour blocks, moving at warp speed, or being pushed that fast, and a month can go by pretty fast.
I mean, I just paid rent, right? And now I gotta do it again?
Maybe it’s just not me…I mean, I basically thought I was going to quit the blog a few weeks ago, and traffic just shot through the roof. Quite the unintentional marketing scheme, really. Maybe others are picking up on the karmic vibe. That restless, “there has to be more than this” feeling. Blogs are great in picking up that sort of dissonance, since they are by nature a willful slowing of time to articulate the events that seem to hurtle past us. We as writers either try to capture the existent, fleeting moment, or seek to catalog the memory before it slips away.
Thing is, that’s not what I usually do here. I mouth off, play the fool, you laugh a bit, and we all move on with our days. Lately, tho, I’ve felt like a fool, only I’ve found that we’re all in the same boat…it’s a big game of chicken. 5th grade all over again. Someone, somewhere, they must know what it’s all about, right? And we just try to glom onto the person we feel has the answers we need. Usually we guess wrong, though, and as such, we’re pinballing around, bumper to bumper, bumping into each other with great frequency and quite often, great damage.
Been thinking a lot over the past 48 hours about something Jenny said to me in a museum about 18 months ago. I’ve quoted it here before, but I’ll quote it again, cuz hey, this is my site. I was looking at a painting by Mondrian, and it looked so…simple. Bugged me. I liked most work in the museum because I appreciated the fact that I couldn’t actually create that myself. But this…this looked just…well, doable. I grew annoyed. “I don’t get it…why is this in a museum? I could have done this!”
“Ah,” she said. “But you didn’t. And that’s the point.”
And the time, I scoffed at her, cuz that’s what we did a lot: scoff at each other. But it’s why I write, I find. The best writing to me seems like it always should have been written, and usually by me, and why didn’t I think of it first, darn it all? The ease is of course deceptive, I have a failed novel to attest to that, in addition to hundreds of articles I contemplated and never wrote or finished. I make it a point to read Sarah Dessen’s site everyday, not just because she’s got a great blog, but because she’s a constant inspiration to me. She writes for a living. She helps others to achieve that goal as well. I’m not one of her students, but she’s teaching me all the same. She's got novels in the works, maintains a blog, and just had a movie adapted from her work. To quote King Missile, "That's so cool."
So, as such, I write because I can. Hardly Decartes, but there you have it. I get jealous when I see good writing because I want it to be mine. So, I write. And write. Not because I want to supplant others, but because I want to sit side by side with them. Writing has been an oasis for me in this 30-day whirlwind, and it will continue to be so, I feel, for a while to come. And most of you have made this very public space very comfortable for me, and for that I thank you.
And come tomorrow, I’m on a bus to NYC for a 5-day break. Feels fitting that I’m leaving on October 1st. Hopefully a good start to a new month. And maybe, the start of something else as well. We’ll see.