Catching Up...

            My, haven’t the last few weeks been a bit… unpredictable? Such is the marathon mindfuck that is the holiday stretch from Thanksgiving to Christmas to New Year’s Eve. Couple that with a ravaging illness, a complete change in my professional life, and the impending end of the world in nine days and, well… let’s just say things haven’t been quite going my way. But who am I to lament? Haven’t we all been there at one time or another? You know… those pits and gullies in life where you find yourself begging to be eviscerated by the gnarled death of zombies or to be set upon by a tribe of cruel, salaciously vicious pygmies JUST so you can avoid facing the waking light of dawn. Or maybe that’s just me: hell, when you’re bummed out and sauced enough who doesn’t concoct a litany of bizarre statements that sound better in the head than ever being said?

            I digress. The point is, to manipulate a Volkswagon slogan for my own devices, on the road of life… there are passengers and there are drivers, but my car seems to be lacking breaks and the driver is blind stinking drunk! Yup, things have gone askew. But, as my saintly patient mother reminded me: one door closes, another opens. So maybe me getting mugged and violated by that perverted goon known as the everyday is a Fourth of July fireworks display going off. Maybe it’s pounding me on the coconut, whispering: time for a change? Who knows… other than Papa Hemingway, that is?

            Throughout all of this, however, my biggest disappointment is with myself and my inability to stay honest and true to what I care so deeply for. To clarify for those of you just joining us, that would be writing. This experiment in meta-writing known as a blog, on my new book (despite being really happy with recent plot changes), even in the rambling gibberish that runs through my head and which I jot down in notebooks. I’ve been an absent husband to my metaphysical wife called writing and it’s absolutely infuriating. Despite setbacks, I always try to work. Okay, I’ll give myself a week off… seeing as I was convinced I was incubating the reincarnated Bubonic Plague. But other than that, shame on me.

            The encouraging part is that I wasn’t lacking the words themselves. No, this time around… I was lacking the time and willingness to sacrifice comfort and rest to get the words on the page. Or screen. Or whatever the hell you’re reading this damned thing on! Point is, in my earlier (and admittedly purple) days, I was unflinching in my willingness to suffer a literary crucifix so long as I did what I do.

            Maybe I’ve gotten soft. It could be getting older; it could be wielding more responsibility than someone with Peter Pan syndrome can handle; it could be the mirage of serenity in Shangri LA. Who can say for sure? Yet another one of those goddamn rhetorical questions! I think I’m starting to even piss myself off with those things! But it is a part of being a person in pursuit of a dream, constantly locked in doubt and confusion while wandering the desert of anonymity. In the end, really all you can do is just keep trudging, hoping to find that promised land of recognition and justification.

            Happily, I have but a few more days in this festering desert city that calls itself angelic. Then I’ll be going coast to coast, back to the rustic mysticism of my humble hometown roots. Couple that with bringing in the New Year back in my –creatively formative city of New York with some of my closest friends and compatriots… and I’ll have a plethora of shenanigans to base new short stories on! So tune back in soon for some of the old stuff. For now, I just felt the need to talk! But I’ll close with bit of prose I wrote thinking about my generation. Until next time, you goddamn aluminum-foil eating freaks!

                                                                        -s/j.@

Alanis Morissette said it

            best:

            “what it comes down to…

            is that no one’s really got it

                        figured out just yet.”

Such a better testament to

the youth today has never

            been stated.

The angst and sense of the

            unknown has grown into

something far more insidious.

It is a creature that lurks

            in the shadows behind our

eyelids; it is the loss of

            a POINT.

Those of us in our mid-twenties

no longer have anything

to look forward to; our lives

have become a mathematical

equation… devoid of the X-factor

            known as experience.

We are raised in elite,

            private kindergartens…

where playing with blocks is

            no longer

acceptable.

From the time we can

talk we receive instructions

                        on what to say;

by the time we can walk

            we are expected to be

varsity athletes.

When was it decided for

us that we had to be

            perfect?

Colleges have become four-year

vocational schools,

                        around merely to

gain us nothing more than gainful

            employment.

More and more, we’re encouraged

            to think

                        less and less.

In place of imagination, we

have been inundated by

            the Digital Holocaust:

from birth we’re plugged into

electronics… the manipulative

stimuli of the digital menace.

Books are obsolete,

            toys are distractions,

                        and crayons have been

deemed offensively ineffective.

There’s not one moment when

            the world is not a single

                        click away.

And those before wonder

            why

we’re so fucked up?

We never really figured

            shit out

because we were never really

            given the

                        chance.       

                               -3/31/11