adventures in writing

(Written 28 August 2006, 8:06pm. I know I'm jumping round a little bit, but I'm finding more writing on my hard drive than I remember having. Bear with me.)

An exercise, right? Okay. Three glasses of water: Check. Cigarette: double Check. Sustenance: In Transit. Shower to feel human. Built like a human so I better act like one. Beer number one: yet to be cracked. Might avoid for the evening, might go with water instead. Doesn’t rot my brain like beer. John Coltrane on the tape deck. Will switch to Psychedelic Furs later, but fuck music for the moment. I remember making the transition from writer to musician. Kind of a cop-out, allowed me out of the writing gig. Letters are infuriating. Sound is painful, right? I talk and I talk and I remember standing and talking in Hart House summer 1999 and I remember the infuriation of the standing placation I received. It’s like comedy, right? It’s like making people laugh, except there are tears. There should be tears. There weren’t any tears summer 1999, except maybe mine when I went back to the concrete basement at 60 Gilley Road and wrote my first song. It started there, I think. I couldn’t imagine more placation and I heard that musicians are above contention. When I was sixteen that was true. More water. Somehow it’s intoxicating me, not the same way as beer and gin, intoxicating like I’m cleaning out my insides. It’s kind of a contradiction. I put in my eyes earlier and now they’re gumming up. I always get gummed up when I can see. Short staccato sentences, that’s what stream of consciousness is about, right? Who am I asking? Maybe I’m asking her. Maybe I’m performing to a sold-out show of one. I have to stop doing that, I think. I think I have to stop making my day-to-day an exercise in theater. Should I stop doing that? I think it makes me happy, I think it makes it safe to glance at the mirror beside me. My eyes are always worried, I think as I look sideways at myself: that profile in the mirror. I remember writing about the mirrors a couple years back, when I first moved here. When everything was different, right? Adding “right” to a sentence makes it less cliché. “When everything was different” on its own sounds like it walked of its own volition out of a Harlequin Romance novel and onto my page. I don’t know how it got here, don’t ask me. I thought I buried cliché back when I burned secret cigarettes outside my parents’ house and then ate leaves from trees hoping the chlorophyll would cover up the smell. From what I understand it didn’t. I find myself going back and correcting small errors in continuity as I move along because the goddamn green squiggly lines on the Microsoft Word screen irritate the shit out of me. Stop don’t think. Don’t read back over. She said it’s a bad idea, and I believe her. She could tell me the sky was fuchsia and I’d probably believe her, at this point. It’s getting hard to concentrate around the burning pit of my stomach. It’s not hunger, you understand. Humans get hungry and I’m a freezing cold animal machine, just because I’m not as hot as Henry Rollins, who is and was and will be the Hot Animal Machine. I’m gears and wires and faulty circuit boards wrapped in a chewy mammal shell. I read yesterday that pollution is shrinking the genitals right off of polar bears and it makes me remember the polar bear tales my dad brought back from Churchill Manitoba 1979. I don’t know why dates are that important to me, but for some reason they give me something to hold onto. Dates are important – history is important. It’s history that makes us. That’s what I was trying to explain to Crazy Sean, that all the Buddhism in the world can’t eradicate memory. It reminds me of that movie, the one with Jim Carrey, the one I actually liked. Erase the memory, erase the experience, erase the importance, live in a vacuum, grow like astronauts, come back to earth with back problems, you dig?

Burned the motherfucking chili. Spent ten minutes scrubbing the pot, the new one I’ve been trying to keep in good shape for the sake of the married couple it belongs to. Now my hand doesn’t work right, won’t type properly. People wonder why I’m tied to the mundane – here’s the proof. Writing, even writing like this, dragged me out of synch with the rest of the world, and as a result I damaged something important to somebody else. Isn’t that always how it works out one way or another? Decided on beer after all. For whatever reason, alcohol keeps me in touch with the mundane, reminds me to eat even while telling me I shouldn’t, gives me an excuse to burn the chili. Now my hands are shaking, probably not from withdrawal Fucking green squiggly lines are telling me that I should have written “and gives me an excuse…”. Like I didn’t goddamn know that. You’d be surprised what I’m aware of, given the opportunity to elucidate it. I’m feeling it now, the desire and intense drive to stop right here, go eat my burned-ass chili, maybe watch a movie, maybe the rest of American History X that I started the other day. It’s overwhelming, the desire to stop. I don’t think there’s any real reason for it other than laziness, at least I hope there isn’t. Otherwise there might be some – fuck, some validity to the idea that something’s trying to stop me. It certainly feels that way. My hands are fucking up and making me go back and fix typos, I couldn’t even think of the word “validity” a second ago. I’m concentrating on John Coltrane, I’m trying not to give in. My eyes are getting gummed up again, make me leave, make me go take out my contacts, then go wander, go wander around my apartment, maybe have a smoke, maybe finish this beer, maybe go eat and watch TV and kill kill kill my brain. Rot it out, replace this pain with the Simpsons or something. Don’t think, for God’s sake don’t think, right? There I go asking questions again to people that aren’t there. I am holding on to an image of her and trying to remember what makes me this way. I’m not that deep, goddamn it. I’m not that tortured, I have no reason to be. There’s this little Jim Morrison that lives in my head and stares in the Narcissus pool all damn day. I’m not this important for fuck’s sake. I’m performing, I’m a parody of whatever I’m trying to be. I’m the ice-cold animal machine and I’m programmed to do nothing other than what’s required. I’m trying so hard to break this ceramic cover that I can see through and can’t reach through, you dig? Like I have to get through it, like I sealed it up and then forgot that I needed to get in and out of that room. Drink of beer, drink of water. Eyes squeeze shut. They open again and nothing is solved, nothing is clearer. I don’t want it to be clear, I want to obfuscate this and everything so I can not do what I’m trying to do to myself right now. That’s what it is: if I get back in touch with this, with whatever it was that made me that way, I get back in touch with all of it. If I write I touch it and I’m really trying to be a better person. Here’s the next step now, an intense desire to drink. It’s like a cold pit in my stomach, a prelude to burning that cools down to a nice warm expanding feeling in my limbs. The cold animal machine powers down and simmers lukewarm in gin and maybe a little bit of lime or something like that. I can smile then. The beer is a mild approximation, but it feels good. I’m calmer, now. The ceramic is loosening up a little around the edges and the words are starting to come more smoothly. A deep breath, then I let it out. I feel better. The only problem is now I’m more susceptible to that intense desire to stop, now it’s more of a “why keep going” than a directive to stop goddamnit for whatever reason. Now it’s more of a time to relax vibe, put your feet up, you’ve got Coltrane on the deck, put on something else, put on something you can halfheartedly play along to, pick the same old strings in the same old way, don’t think, don’t create, birth is painful. It’s easier to play somebody else’s songs, you know that? It’s easier to read other people’s poetry, even easier to read my old work, because I’m comfortable in the notion that it wasn’t me that wrote it, you know, it wasn’t me that traced lines and lines and lines and lines along my arms and along the mirror with a rolled-up twenty, it wasn’t me that did those things, that monster poetry thing isn’t me you know? It doesn’t have to be me, at least, I can be a better person, I can change and I can get better and I can leave it behind leave it behind leave it behind safely in the past where it can’t get anybody. Of course I’m lying, of course I have to take responsibility, of course I can’t put it off any longer because I’m trying to be a better person because that’s my thing, servo verum and all that, got to make it true if it’s going to be true. It’s only going to be true if I can say it in the mirror so say it in the mirror. It’s true it’s true. I take responsibility and I accept the consequences and I won’t do it again, not ever. I’m leaving it behind, I’m stopping, I’m stopping, I won’t hurt you anymore, I promise and please believe me when I say I promise because I promise. My hands are shaking and I can’t control it because it all comes back. This is why I stopped, don’t you understand that? I mean, come on, who wants to live like this? Who wants to have to exert this kind of control all the time, who wants to be this way? I know. This is unhealthy, this isn’t an exercise it’s a waste of time, I’m going to drink my beer and pick my old songs and be obscure and be obscured, why won’t you let me? Can you still love me if I’m obscured? Can you still love me if I’m not a poet? Can I be normal and still experience the extraordinary with you? I don’t know if I can, I don’t know if you’ll let me lobotomize myself that way, or let me keep lobotomizing myself that way, because that’s what I’m doing you know, I’m flushing it out, that’s why I like water because it’s flushing out all the disease. I’m never ever going to read this again after today, I’m never ever going to do this again after today, this is disgusting, this is a waste of time and energy and a waste of electricity, why can’t I just go play a video game or drink more beer or something? Since when do I have a code to live by? Since when do I have anything to prove to anybody? Fuck you for making me do this. I don’t mean that. This is so hard. My skin feels like it’s crawling, I don’t know how much more of this I can take. Maybe I should eat the burned-ass chili and step back for a minute, I think at this point it might be healthy. I promise I promise to come back to it, I promise, okay? I’m going to just eat and come back. I’m going to just try to feel more human again and kill the pit in my stomach and then I’ll come back. Deep breath.

10:33PM

My Psychedelic Furs tape is dead. It’s twenty odd years old, I guess I can’t blame it for crapping out. It’s too bad though; I like that band. Iggy Pop also went down for the count as Real Wild Child was on the other side. I’ve decided that Iggy Pop is what I’m into for the moment, though, and so I’m rewinding another tape…it’s Iggy with Bowie somewhere live I think. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t care. Long as it’s loud and grating. I was just outside on the deck for a cigarette and the skyline looks like the world’s longest bleeding mouth. Looks like some sadistic city planner took an Exacto knife right across the horizon and plated it with glaring orange lights. I’m beginning to wonder whether it was a good idea to fuel the ice cold animal machine because the deeper I dig the more regret I find. The gin is helping, but not much. I feel it chewing at the corners of my perception, like something I can only see out of the corner of my eye. I seriously considered the amount of time it’d take me to get to the first floor if I stepped off the balcony. This is part three. If it can’t stop me from writing through laziness and booze I suppose it’ll do whatever it takes, right? I’m not asking you, I’m sorry. You don’t know the answer. Lock me up. Seriously, I think I need some time away. Nice white walls and a padded room. If there’s one thing this has taken away from me it’s the desire to avoid cliché. I can honestly say that I don’t give a fuck anymore. I’m sweating right now and yet I’m freezing cold. Maybe I am getting sick. Maybe I’ve been sick all along. What if this is some kind of mental illness? What if none of this is any good, it’s just symptoms of a disease and I don’t even know I have it? I want to feed this music directly into my head and turn it up as loud as it’ll go. Iggy’s got a fever and so do I.