Eleven Years Ago Today

photo by moonjazz.

Every now and then, I’ll think I’ll post a past entry from my journals – one, five, ten years ago to the day. Like this entry, March 11th, 1999:

I am so good at deleting, better than at writing. I just wrote several lines about a coworker, then turned back and deleted them because it was so much telling. I realized that a true writer would have painted a picture of this person and let the reader make judgments like "he was awkward in social situations." Why not write the scene of him standing at the foot of my cube, looking over my papers, standing with that poker face of his, not revealing a thought or expression, just a stone wall face with the sharp cut of his nose and standing there like a guard before the gate.

Where's the creativity, hiding back there in the shack at the far end of a field gone fallow? Back when I was ten or twelve, my friend and I would run out across the tall grass to a wooden shack. Pull dead weeds and sticks and stuff them into a coffee can, then strike a match and watch it burn. The smell of burning grass, the sudden crackle of the flames, the smoke chugging out of the can like the smoke stack from a steam engine. In the shack we would find wrinkled clippings of naked women from Playboy magazine, the clippings handled so many times by grubby adolescent fingers that it'd grown soft, almost like cloth. Out there we also stashed away the compass and hunting knife that I stole from my dad’s top dresser drawer.

I pause, stare into the art prints on the walls of my den, music softly playing, the flickering of the candle on the desk, staring off into space and realizing that theme and meaning in a story must be drawn between the actions, must be plucked from the observances and the events, and I look off into all the shapes around me and try to depict the patterns, and wonder if any can really be drawn, wonder what truths I can really claim to see. I realize after a while that it is a waste of time. Why try to write, when I know that I don't have any truths for my readers. Perhaps that's why I don't have any readers. The act of writing has become merely masturbation, a self-absorbed indulgence of my sensibilities.

Bang! The starting pistol goes off and I launch myself out across the field, past the shack and over the smooth waters of the pond and up into the air above the woods. Then dive down into the dirt and the grubs and the Indian burial stones trod on by the tennis shoes of boys out to find beer cans in the weeds. I drank beer out in the woods until I was thrilled with liquor and stars, wavering in the rings of friends, crushing cans and tossing them away and grabbing another. Then off into the night in our cars, creeping down quiet suburban streets, past the darkened houses where the girls we loved slept.

I pause. When I write, I write for myself. My children play outside the door to the den, trying to draw me out to play, but I am playing here, in the space just above the keyboard, where my fingers dip and weave through the air like a dressmaker or a potter or the baker kneading his dough. It was something in the beauty of the words all scattered across the screen, forming shapes by the paragraph breaks and the curve of the letter "c". The languor of the dipping letters and the crossed T’s like a lifeline on the palm of one who had died too young.