Christmas 2005 in retro

I've been away for a while; both mentally and physically. Most of December, really. During Christmas week I was in Florida with my Mom and Ken, enjoying the warmth and good company, but no internet. So I'll post a couple entries in retrospect:

December 23, 2005 —

This is my first morning at my Mom’s house. I came down to Florida for the Holidays again, but am feeling homesick. That’s a good sign. I think last year I was still feeling like I didn’t really have a home, that my apartment was more like a hotel, and that home was where my mother was. But now I’ve made my apartment quite comfortable for myself, my own little space in the city.

My Mom’s place is cold in the morning. But once I get up and move to the sun room, I’m warmed up by the sun coming off the golfcourse. I’m trying different spots in the house to find a comfortable place to write. I think it will be here, on the down filled sofa, with the sun behind my back and turning my screen into a collage. Or maybe on the patio.

I want to be in my big leather chair by the window, listening to classical music. I want to spend the afternoon in my favorite tea shop or at Dunn Bros, with my wireless internet access. I have no internet access here from my laptop, but I can always go on my Mom’s computer. I wanted to work on my blog and my homepage, make donations to charitable organizations before the end of the year, research financial advisors, and maybe even start my match.com profile, or sign up on ancestors.com. But being banned from the internet on this laptop during the next week will be good for my writing. It eliminates distraction. I’m left here to my own devices.

So what would I write while I’m here? Do I really think I can delve into Tea House? I’m confident I can get to Stuttersville at least, and I should probably tackle The Third Hour, as it was here that the first ideas came to me, one year ago. I have a knack for waking up here at three am, and stumble down an unfamiliar darkened hallway towards the bathroom. So write something already.
……..
We slipped well past the fence, scaled the hill, and dropped down to the weedy ground with our case of beer. Drinking in an empty field with nothing but the stars and your closest friends opens up the universe, spans time even in the moment. I looked across at Rocky and Andrew with the eyes of a thirty-six year old knowing he would remember what this moment felt like. Chad was taking a piss somewhere twenty yards away and talking to us over his shoulder, something about a girl that liked him or what we should be doing. He had the most confident grin that I had ever seen. A slight gap between his two front teath. Always grinning.

I went through phases where I distanced myself from these friends and from the late night drinking. It made me strung out, depressed, like I was throwing my life away at sixteen and that I should sitting down to writing if I ever had plans to make it. Sometimes I just wanted to recover what little innocence remained inside me. I remember walking home, strung out and hung over at 9:00 AM one morning and almost crying because I wanted to be a little boy excited about going fishing with my Dad again. I just wanted to be fishing, and that I’d never touched that Jim Beam of the night before, or taken a smoke off that pot pipe, or knew everything that I had known now. But there’s no going back.

It’s too hard to pretend that you’ve never seen what you have seen. You can’t forget what it’s like to be high in the back of a Trans-am, or what it’s like putting your hand up the shirt of a girl you just met at a fast food joint. And you’d be a fool to want to go back to being that little kid on his tenspeed, right? You’d be a geek, a nerd, a dork, a loser. You just want more, friends with faster cars, girl with bigger tits and that’ll go farther.

And I met those girls and I got in those cars. The funniest thing was that the guys with the fastest cars drove the slowest. The girls with the biggest tits didn’t let you see them. But there’s always the girls that’ll go all the way on the first night, no matter if it’s in a car or a school playground or their parents basement. Shit we grew up fast. Was my crowd unusual in this?

Okay, I’m going to read for a while, then go to bed. I’ll have most of the morning to myself tomorrow. I will start writing Stuttersville. Then maybe by Monday I’ll be writing The Third Hour. I’d like that. I had dreams not unlike those I imagine for the story, though last night the dreams were more urban, the flying terror being myself, the hands that clutched the throats and choked the hotel guests my own hand.

Merry Christmas. Merry Merry Christmas. On the third night of Christmas my true love said to me: burry me in the manger. Let me smell the bales of hay, the lulling of cattle, the scurry of field mice under the door.