unfinished business- good morning
mornings. exactly just mornings in general are so my thing. I especially learned to love them in my second year of sobriety. It was for me, as a singer and guitar player in a band, something else, I tell you, entirely than what it meant to me as just a man. I only had to learn to live with stage-fright. Easy. Just have it. Ha. Which I did, and by trial and error, by falling down (so to speak), by making mistakes, by re-learning how to cope when I could, I became something else I suppose. But you know, re-discovering what was my thing whenever and whatever the circumstance, that was difficult. But I love mornings. Mornings. Mornings!- so yummy, so “my thing”. Everybody has that one little part of a day that makes them tick. And tick-tick-tick-goes my soul when I get a full morning of writing in. Ah, what a crush.
I try and not read “re-blogs”. I think to myself “ah, what’s the point” I suppose sometimes my curious nature gets the better of me and frankly, there are some very amazing lives being documented who seem to subscribe to our band blog, and to my insistent ramblings-( if you could call them that, even ).
sometimes they are just “heavy” gifts. heavy, as in, if someone perhaps gave to you your first copy of “the heart is a lonely hunter” if it was short, disconnected, frustrated, and not at all worthy of novel length. or if it were mumbling rumblings of a mid thirties man who is still search desperately for some meaning to his life and what that meant on a cosmic scale. Hell, for that, just what it meant to be alone, and somehow still breathing the same air as others, as isolation does this to a person- it makes them very sensitive I think. Most of the time I don’t even know why i share in here. Reluctantly I do. Something tells me it is a good thing. Like an invisible newspaper with nobody pushing it on anyone, and hopefully full of something useful, maybe even funny. Either way, I do. And I have a funny story top share about someone who has decided I have the medical condition “bi-polar” disorder, as if, at 34, I might not have a home or a doctor or a therapist and perhaps I just wandered out of the thick of the woods and straight to a laptop computer beard, leafed coat, and hair full of briars and leaves falling upon the keys as I went through my hard times, or the very little of them I actually care to share in a blog, like Tarzan on medicine and a pouch full of Calmyourself-izipan.
I write stuff, I think out loud, but I write for myself and trust me, so much more goes in there than on here, but I do share- certainly. After all, I am not known, nor are the Cardinals known, for an extensive repertoire of waltzes about UFO’s and surely not political or even antagonistic. It’s simple stuff really. Stuff about feelings and lots of open questions really about what they mean. Hell, I would even consider some of it slightly romantic, if slightly doomed at times. But that’s just me. And maybe I am too close to the material.
That being said, I edited and re-formed my idea’s and how I might share in here as of late because, well, I felt just exhausted. It is exhausting being sick, traveling, away from home, and having this pressure to “be on” at every show, but that is what I do for a living and what I also love- and I always thought that was the point in open-journals- to describe a life, the one you are living- so that this might be a good place to learn about others. And I don’t do much half-assed. If I have a match, even only one left, I find a way to burn whatever it is down, for the love of the smoke and whatever comes next. I am just one of those people I guess. Plus I already tried not giving a fuck. It just came off as posturing, because, well, I was giving too much underneath all that, so, enough with “the mask’s” and all that masquerading. The truth is way too fun.
Also I really am suspect of art that refuses simple truths. One of those being a constant truth that the human condition, day to day, is in constant flux, plus “static” writing and, well, the “arts” in general that refuse the notion that people are constantly dancing to and from some kind of emotional advancement then back again against the wall, that floor being fire and that fire of life being DAMN hot, well, I will just I find it to be, gosh, just boring, and maybe even false. maybe more mask than face.
Someone had a nice laugh with me noting my recent change of heart as a sign of bi-polarity. I liked this analysis. It seemed excellent. It is nice to know youngsters have their psychological reference points within reach of any high speed internet connection, but in truth, a life may go deeper than that. Also, qualified physicians do not usually have the kind of time to create such Bland and Over-Ripe blogs like the one I was privy to this morning in my leisurely time away from rapping endlessly on what day to day feels like an impossible thing to make. A Novel is not for the weak hearted. Trust me. I am in deep and too far to turn back. Which, however frustrating, is kind of lovely, and keeps me attached constantly to the word, and to other books too. I need this. It’s my thing, besides mornings.
Put simply, I was raised to understand what hellish times were, be they of the heart and soul, or just purely worry that comes along with trying to maintain during the draughts of conditional love or even financial woes, and were common, and in the best ways bound us all together as long as the “us”, being whomever a person chose to communicate those feelings to and myself, had some kind of bond. And I am a really really socially awkward shy person by nature, reluctant to share, which is probably why I chose the life I did. I like a good challenge. I must. I have an awful romantic track record and plenty of arthritis to show for it.
One of the first things I read in my youngest days consuming as much “Readers Digest” short stories and anything my grandparents had on hand was Ernest Hemingway’s “the old man and the sea”. His struggle was not with that monster in the ocean, you see, but with himself. It was Ernest out there with that grand sky above him, and that story was, to me, about a loner struggling to bring home the prize, while the world around him was flashing by in a lightning fast blur as his works seems to diminish. He did, after all, drop “Across the River and Into the Tree’s” just before, which did not set the hearts of many on fire. It was about his pride. And age does that to a man. It fucks with his pride. And his sense of purpose.
So, in all his glorious verse, he freaked out in a fit, and took his worst blows ever, self thrown, the boxing ring inside his chest ever-beating, and when things slowed down, he wrote that. And there, there it was. His perfect story. What he was doing before he had to endure Fitzgerald’s “the Great Gatsby” which more or less leveled the writing world and sent poor Ernest in search of his first great “Novel”. He was a born short- story writer and everyone knows this, I think, despite writing “A Farewell to Arms” more or less at the request of Ezra (“whatever you do, make it new,”) Pound, and of course, his pride. He wanted to be the best. Maybe even he saw Fitzgerald and his “Gatsby” as the bull in the ring, or the sea beast to be caught and thought he might take one last battle in that ring, even if he returned to shore bloodied hands and with nothing to really show. It was all about the work, you see, and all about a man, his writing machine, and how far in he might sail, should he test the limits of the horizon and cast himself again too far out from shore to see the faint lines of the coast. And a writer gets places alone. Whole worlds exist inside everybody. Most people run from that, because, well, it isn’t pleasant getting to know yourself now is it. And damn if he didn’t jump to it and leave traces of himself all over the tracks as he raced himself in a land-speed record of pure fictional beauty. What a writer. I’d like to be like that one day. Maybe that is why I share my life. Maybe that is why I love mornings. Reading and writing uninterrupted. No distractions. And awfully lonely. Pleasure and pain sandwich with espresso and an empty room. Me and the words.
But I am not that good see. I am not a natural at anything. I have to learn and re-learn everything. It’s a lot. I am no Hemingway or Fitzgerald and especially no Pound.
Now, I am not like that. I don’t watch the races so to speak. I don’t create competition for myself. I am my own competition. I always, ALWAYS am at my own heels, thumbing through most anything I can get my hands on, falling in love with words and phrases, getting idea’s in my head about songs I think might have been forgot somewhere along the way. But I don’t live that way. Most of the women I have ever fallen for the hardest never even existed in my life-time. I just carry their words around with me. I look for them in crowds but I know they won’t find me listless, confused and wearing awful shoes with ridiculous socks. Still, that is who I am. Or what I am right now, on the outside anyway. No Hemingway here. Just a lost soul, writing it all down. Feeling my way through the dark room, wall by wall, in no hurry to find the switch. Perfectly happy to be afraid of everything any everyone. All that dark makes for great questions and I love process obviously as I haven’t settled on an end result. How could I? in this life? My word, its fat too precious a thing to ignore.
So, am I crazy, a crazy person for sharing? probably. Bi-polar? Not really. Moody, certainly, volatile- totally. A person willing to share internal process- Hell-YES!
I guess I’m just opened up. Somewhere along the ride in my life, I gues I just thought, “what if I just chose to be so open, for a time, day to day, with strangers, perfect strangers, and leave those traces, be they awful, dark, over-thought, and sometimes sunnier and sometimes more full of hope than needed in a single day?” This is the nature of my writing. To expose truth, mine, and the possible synchronized truth my soul has with others. Musical, and other-wise.
So, in answer to a single re-blogger, someone I don’t know, someone who probably is not so informed as to the limits or lack thereof of my intellect verse my emotional condition, I say this-
Bad times and an open heart do not equal modern illness. Retractions and new idea’s that might further that process even if that process is to bare a soul, my own even, to it’s bones, takes some great amount of humility and when you get bone deep with strangers and when you still stand after a storm passes, mine being far more in-depth and more personal than the nature of poetic fictions and built on daily observations on (sometimes) glumness and how a person might advance through that- It does not equal a human polar situation. But I like polarity. It is the essence of magnetism- I wonder if you even know that. Maybe you are too young to have ever been given a large magnet and a Magnifying glass as a kid. I sure had those things. Thumbtacks too. Hell, I can even sew. But this seems “bi-polar” to you and so to your generation I must seem easily explainable and like a joke. eh?
That is, unless, you are so steady of heart and mind that you cannot see this bridge across those rapids below us, and that you choose to walk in a near giggle posture, noting only the wrapping of the twine and this thing, this life, swings sometimes so hard and so fast you choose to not notice others as they go sailing from the sides. You will dear. You will come around. And trust me, you will not like it any more than anyone else who has spent the time here enduring themselves, for those changes in life, they are the knuckles which break the face of a soul first. The rest comes slowly- but a heart knows real pain once and it is a rabbits-foot and the insides of your skin will know it’s beat measure by measure. No night-time programming will fix that noise. Not if you feel your toes to your nose young person.
We do not all reach the green grass just across the bridge. A life can be everything in a day or in a week. And I am well versed in the extremes. I am the weatherman, one of many, you see, who maps these gusts, who charts this change in temperature and who sees the bridge, the life, from all sides- and at my own expense, do I share my thoughts- those same thoughts a “sane” person might fight or tuck away in the night-time static of a television, or the lover they “love” but maybe they do not “like” all that much.
I choose to see all that. And then, sometimes, I choose to share.
If that makes me “manic” or “bi-polar” or worthy or cartoonish illustrations so be it. You will walk the bridge as I walk the bridge as it sways. But without being harsh and simply writing this in the thirty odd minutes I had today to sit before my friends and I depart again for another shared journey which is always worth the wait and sometimes painful feeling, what-with all this being away from home and loved one’s, remember, this thing we cross, this bridge was built by idea’s, and we only got here because someone before us saw that nasty swing of life, and how it settled down again, and felt that it was worth the costly and terrifically boundless scare that comes along with a life. They decided it meant more than than that risk. Because we are all just beginnings and endings with glorious possibilities really. That can come out in the words dear, but only if they are true. Only if you “mean” them. And I do. At my own expense actually.
Now, here is my heart, dear stranger, on a platter. Served raw. Open as a cracked oyster. So, I might ask you,
where exactly is yours, dear?
and should you find it, how far will go once you look down and see the bottom, the sharpened rocks, and the falls, and how much medication will it take for you to forget what it is to walk the walk aware of the plunge?
be careful- if you are anything like me, you will find the only thing which calms your hands long enough to embrace another is a pen, or a steady moment where you mouth the words of a truth you might not even understand,
once it is your heart doing the talking, and your soul, well, that will all be judged really on how gracefully you decided to continue on- knowing we do not reach the other side to safety- that is not our story here is it. We are unfinished works.
and that is the mystery of life, but this walking, it needs its weathermen, and it’s maps, so we know who we are, if only by the differences in the way it was viewed before us, and what a life is regardless of the subtle changes in the colors of the twine of the rails.
be brave- be open- but for yourself, know when you are your eyes and know when you are what you are seeing.
and don’t look down as I have.
Because they do not have words for what that is.
and by all means have a wonderful morning.
R
i want a intership with your brain.
