28.1.07

The Devil's Backbone-memoirish

In a dingy state park near my hometown there is a path up a hill known as The Devil’s Backbone. This particular path on this hill was mythical to me as a child. On our annual campout there the possibility of mounting The Devil’s Backbone was a terrifying and tantalizing challenge. This is because I half-believed that the twisty, knotty path was the actual devil’s spine, fixed for all eternity into place by some odd decree of the modern world, the same way I believed that he still lived in hell and that it was an effective means of showing my love for God to sit on the playground and flip ol' satan the bird through the asphalt, sometimes for the entire recess.

I was still at the age where the law of non-contradiction has not yet taken hold, so it was entirely possible for the devil’s backbone to be fixed into a gnarled path up a steep hill crowded with trees branches and roots and for him to be roaming the world tempting mortals with all manners of tricks while also ruling over the hellfires. For a few years I was much more concerned with the devil than I was with God or Jesus or anything else besides the nightly kneeling prayer of “Now I lay me down to sleep”—this latter because I knew that it might be the last thing I said before I saw the devil—or God, hence the prayer, but you never could tell – and anyway, God –or the devil, but you never could tell-- had a penchant for stealing children from my family in the middle of the night. I was forewarned.

On Morbid Procrastination

What happens when procrastination stops being polite and starts being real?? Much like that voice-over intro to MTV's "The Real World" (which first few seasons had me spellbound in the 90s, even though I know I couldn't have lived anywhere with regular cable access at the time...), I ask myself this question. MTV asked it because they were interested in the "what happens" after the polite. But I'm asking from a different angle. I'd like to find out if there isn't a way to stop myself before the really real of procrastination cometh--before it becomes morbid. And I don't even care what happens after because, actually, there is no AFTER. Morbid procrastination is a state without chronology, just timeless anxiety, movement stalled.

Generally, procrastination can be pleasant, diversionary, leading to a mild build-up of tension that gushes out in a swell of activity that leaves one looking back, stunned, "I got all that done at the last minute?". That's the polite version, the one that seems like just another time management technique, if a less efficient one. Time exists in that version, kinda gently elongated...I imagine it looks like the droop or slump of a ribbon that is not pulled tight at either end, but hangs there with the slackest of tension. Pull it taut and voila--the ends can be tied to something snugly and it looks quite tidy. This is not the kind of procrastination I'm intereste in. It's the other kind, the impolite kind that grips me.

20.1.07

insomniac stream of consciousness--addressed

This is an older writing from elseblog -- just posting here to keep my fragments tidy.
***********************************
The damn pills don't work. We are just talking. What are we talking about?
Hard to recount. Do we start over every day, a blank slate that some good
pupil has washed clean with turpentine and aloe? Noxious fumes
never penetrate, they envelop; they soothe. They bring false comfort,
like suicide. But all comfort appears false.
Will I remember that in your arms? Hard to recall.

I still believe in comfort, and sorrow, and sparking flint.
I am softsoftsoft...I am a box of kindling heavy with dewdrops.
There is no satisfaction in finding a twig that won't snap underfoot.
Who doesn't cry out when broken? A smoldering fire is no joy for
eyes used to firecrackers. My bending is supple, unyielding, insufferable.
You can break your neck on it if you don't watch out.
There is no narrative trace, no guiding thread,
Ariadne would order us both shot.
We don't deserve a labyrinth if we are only climbing out of our own skins.
There are questions one should bother to dream--bulls don't just show up on your doorstep.

No one decides, although one may pretend otherwise midway. Who holds the log book, recording all these dank comings and goings? But we're not writing a book. There is neither truth nor lie here. Worse, there's no fiction in our fiction. There is no address between us, there is only the approach. An eternal approach


burning, an unsent letter

I should be working, but I can't. I am distracted by these letters at my feet. This stack of letters from over 10 years ago. Uncanny repetitions in my present-- in form only, but the form evokes the content, takes my mind, wraps it around this thing that was -- bring these letters out of hiding. Among the stack from you is a letter I wrote but never mailed. It is handwritten, and I see the me of the past, licking the envelope, addressing it; I sealed it, and later unsealed it. I don't know why. Did it remain unsent or did I re-write it? I no longer remember. There were so many letters, so many repetitions. My handwriting on the envelope looks childish -- big, careful, almost looping. I wasn't a child, and yet ... And yet, wasn't I?

I re-read your letters with a little amazement. You were my age now (maybe even a year younger) when you wrote them, when you wrote things like these, just one little parcel of the hundreds of pages that for some reason haunt me tonight: