I trudged back to the house from the coop with a few eggs in my basket and noted, as I crunched through the swiftly melting snow, that I could find my characteristic treads with their waffle gridwork marking my trudge ahead of me, mixed through with Daisy’s paw prints that have persisted after her by a couple weeks now, but even then, I could feel the mist turning to flecks and drops of rain, and felt a knot of tension just south of my ribcage.
Soon all this will be gone.
Soon the rain will come and the world will continue turning over, the endless cycle cycling through to the next new moment and the next and the next.
I haven’t been able to pin the shape of how I feel lately except as a color to the world, or maybe a colorlessness. It’s fair, of course, in that the world around us has turned to a river of shit, sent downstream to drown anyone with a soul by a cadre of bullies guffawing at their stunts and hijinks even as the world starts to suffer under their muddy torrent of bad ideas, but it’s not that. I grew up under the pink thumbs of bullying monsters, and watched the waves come and go. It’s only new in its naked obscenity, where the murderous past still had enough remaining life in those crackling burned-out souls for the monsters to hide some of what they are.
It’s not that, other than that’s the color of the background, the steady murky orange of the skies over burning oilfields choking under a worn-out sun.
It’s not that. (more…)
Figure out who you are…
…and then do it on purpose, in the words of the indelible Dolly Parton. I started writing ages ago, it seems, but was a little wayward in figuring out what I am good at doing, largely because the people doing it already remained just outside of my line of sight, often obscured by the (in my mind) overly vaunted Very Important Novelist and other towering figures of literature. I write because it’s inherent to me, I think, but giving it a name, even belatedly, is a useful thing.
I write, sometimes for my stage act as a combination stand-up autobiographer and house band, sometimes entirely for myself, and sometimes for an imaginary newspaper that would print my occasional columns like a rambling and often profane aspirant to the space Armistead Maupin occupied back in the day, but I’ve been reading E.B. White as a sort of post-election therapy and I’m struck by how much of White’s take on the task of the essayist truly nails my own assortment of flaws and strengths:
The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each new excursion of the essayist, each new “attempt,” differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.
(more…)