mother

He tossed another bottle into the bin. The other five clinked and clanked and calttered in excitement for their new companion. In a few moments he will get up and make his seventh trip to his small white refrigerator, on instinct, to grab another beer but first a quick thought about his mother slips in unprovoked. The clock told him it was just after 12a.m. And he figured she would still be up and wondered about calling her, but didn’t. Still, he wondered . He got up to discover his lack of beer and wondered back outside to light a cigarette instead. By this point in his mother’s life she would have to have been nowlingly pregnant with him and for a fleeting second he envied her. He put his cigarette out and laid down and was rocked to sleep.

shit out of luck

You want me to start this story telling you all about how much I want something. How I yearn, I need, I plee to god for some final resolution. Or at the very least I expect me to fabricate some character with this spectacular quality. Why? Because these are the qualities you have realized you most desire in yourself, yet are fully and utterly vacant. The very same goes for me. To lie to you in this reguard, or to create an embodiment of our desire would be false of me so I simply wish you tell you up front: we’re both shit out of luck If I do succeeded in telling you any sort of story the characters you will meet will be just as without resolution or aim as you and I. They will cry silently for purpose. They will be a train dreaming of life as a motorcycle. If you can’t sympathize with these concepts i’ve laid out I would urge you to quit reading. You’re going to find all this quite pathetic and it will not be worth your time. In fact if you are so self assured of your purpose, if you have found that ultimate drive, that magnatism towards a single subject of effort than you should perhaps even put down all literature. I write for those wholly sick with the human condition. For those who are just as diseased as myself.

pools

All i want it one big shining sparkling temperate pool of salvation. I want to run towards it, to leap off the burning tearing concrete into its vast refreshment. To be saved. A baptism of comfort and inspiration. I want to hear is soft lapping coo’s to resonate with the lost tones of my youth and to resonate the dusty frequencies and to rattle me up enough to do something. Its water just cool enough to give you goosebumps, enough to force a new appreciation of the beaming sun after you force yourself out. Shake me up. Make me live. Make live. Please, power beyond myself, make me live, for i have lost the power to strike my own cords any more. 

intro

I will tell you straight from the beginning: this is not a story of great adventure, heroism, or wonder. No great triumphs are made, material or otherwise, and you will find no heroes with your admiration. This is little more than a personal recollection, a real life tale of the small adventures, and small triumphs of myself and two close friends many years ago when we were even more naieve than we are now. 

happiness

the only times i’ve been happy in reent memory has been in the act of travel. driving to houston and back on this recent trip. exploring san antonio for a night a few weeks ago. walking for miles upon miles in austin seeing places which I had missed for the last twenty years. the firm idea that the land in front of you is the goal and the area behind you is old news and that you must continue on, step by step, or mile by mile towards you goal is so damned simple and soul fullfilling. even if the stopping point is unknown there is always a destination, forward. put another foot down towards the new. free yourself from all the labors of decision making and such think about simple ideas. explore them. fly around the idea of converting to some eastern philosophy. surf down the waves of fitzgerald and see where it goes. get in a heated argument with your mother about how to cook a roast. the physical action of playing is great and necessary but so to is the intellectual act.

travel is also in some ways a childish pathetic retreat fro real life. from work, from responsibilities, from societal presssures. it says to the world “look i can’t handle it right now and i’m going to put myself in a little timeout and think about what i’ve done because i’m scared of whats happened already and i dont have any clue what will happen next.

writing

none of this is to say all this writing business is to go anywhere at all. there are thousands of writers better than me, and thousands of people more inventive than me. but just supposing i did want to try and make even a small something out of it the idea of learing a new craft is damn scary. i’ve spent upwards of seven years playing guitar, racking up endless hours (though even now i’m only slightly skilled and I regret that I have not put in even more hours. i know now that there are peers among me that have surpassed my abilities to the point that I could hardly hope to make up the lost ground) and to think that i’m entertaining the idea of yet another artistic persuit that requires just as much commitment, in hours, in mental energy, in emotional energy, if not even MORESO than my guitar playing is goddamned terrifying. and in writing there is even more to loose than in composing music, at least from the mind of the creator. fiction is always autobiographical. 100%. without exception. whether or not the events ever happened or the characters ever existed every idea, every theme, every neurocies that exists in your work, first existed in yourself and you are letting those little pieces of yourself out for god and everybody (and all the girls!) to see. just the same as it is with songwriting and hell its taken me those 7 years to play just 3 songs to about 15 people. fucking hell.