2005-03-30 - 10:24 a.m.
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HEY hey KIDS kids WHERE ARE YOU? NOBODY TELLS YOU WHAT TO DO BABY huuuuuuuuuuu
"Rows of houses, all bearing down on me
I can feel their blue hands touching me
All these things into position
All these things we'll one day swallow whole
And fade out again
And fade out
This machine will
Will not communicate these thoughts and this strain I am under
Be a world child form a circle before we all go under
And fade out again and fade out again
Cracked eggs dead birds scream as they fight for life
I can feel death can see its beady eyes
All these things into position
All these things we'll one day swallow whole
And fade out again and fade out again
Immerse your soul in love
Immerse your soul in love"
-Radiohead "Street Spirit(Fade Out)
There are five clocks in my office that stare at me at any given moment. Some of them have hands that spin like a third base coach telling his runner to zoom for home, yelling to the sun to dip down behind the embrace of the horizon. Others are just numbers in a reverse countdown, blasting upwards forever in a neverending cycle of 60s, a race to the next second only a tick inside a computer's brain. The harsh and unyielding truth timer. At least with hands, there is a blur. You can figure they say 10:24 or :23 or even :22 and that gray area gives you more life to live because if you never knew you didn't have those few minutes, you'd never be pushed like you are with the digital truth.
Despite these numerous clocks, there is no sound of ticking in the office. In fact, today, there is no sound in the office except the chattering teeth sound of my fingers pounding a keyboard at 80 words a minute while MP3s I stole from the internet blare out of my speakers randomly. Method Man will be taken over by R.E.M. who will succumb to The Clash who will bow out to a song off of the Grey Album. It all seems so random.
The one thing that seems not to get done at work is work. I seem to be focusing past the boundaries of my desk, into the void of the world cluttered with it's antpeople scattered and shuttling from one giant antmound to another, whipping around in metal deathtraps or long metal coffins with McGriddle ads on the side of them. There is a vastness to the small, small world we live in that is utterly astounding and breathtaking. I've personally gone from one side of this country, from the upper right of the box, down to the lower left of the the coutry, into the abyss of a desert plain and the nothing it commands like Ozymandias. It seems like such a distance and there were expanses of boxes of land flowing underneath the whole flight and forever out into the hungry horizon, eating the edges of the world and regurgitating it out somewhere else as "here".
And yet despite the distances I've seen, it is nothing. I've seen nothing. I've flown from one city to the next, been in all time zones in this country and still haven't seen anything in the world. The intricacies of foreign societies, the small creatures of local customs. The sights of alien but familiar landscapes, the awe of a new mountain or flat plain or something I've never seen before. I have only seen the boundaries of this country, only slammed around the edges of this box like a pinball shot around off of flippers and bumpers. And through the noise and thumps of it all, I've found so little out there that I could grab with one hand and get excited about. I've found so little to get out of hand ripshit about. I've found new people drifting through new tracts of the grid of civilization.
I'm looking for a job now. I don't see the prospects I used to see. I used to read descriptions of jobs with candyeyes, everything so sacchrine and exciting, like answering phones was the equivalent of tantric sex. And somehow in the mix, I got to taste the world of the corporate rat, run it's race and I've found it to be quite a boring run. I've even tried self-sufficiency, spending my days writing for profit to see what it would be like to starve like the artist I'd ultimately become. I only found myself bastardizing my love, battering my heartfelt passion like a drunken husband clicheing his metaphorical wife around a hypotheical apartment. I couldn't imagine being forced to write, being rolled up and squeezed out until the last of the literally toothpaste is out. I've read stories from people who've been through it, heeded their stories of hardships and struggle and then realized that I'm only reading the stories of those who survived and lived to tell those stories. For every success in any business, there are thousands of failures. Somewhere, there is a man sitting in a shanty or shack of an apartment in the middle of an urban highrise with a crying stomach and watery eyes looking at the concrete sprawl before him and daydreaming when it will be his turn. He'll pour your coffee for you or bring your food out, scraping the tips off the table like his fingers up the wall of life. He'll brood when he comes home, his breath ripe with booze of some kind or maybe his head clogged with the current drug of choice, legal and otherwise. Or maybe neither - maybe just a plain old ordinary troubled mind will slam itself into the rubber walls of the inside of his head as he pleads in a monologue testimony to the world that has no idea he's talking to them that he just wants one break, that's it. That's all. He just wants to be heard for once.
He'll say this to no one.
Somewhere, this man will type day in, day out when he's not piecing together an income slowly. And he'll laugh when the muse fucks his brain hard and he'll tear pieces of paper and scream aloud when she's giving him the cold shoulder. He'll become agitated and relieved and elated and destroyed and maybe - MAYBE - he'll one day be done. And will sit like a mother bird on his creativity's egg hoping one day it will hatch or he will crush it under his weight, no one ever getting to enjoy the sweetness of his hard work.
And he isn't a he. He is a she. She is a they. They exist. They are everywhere, in this country, in other countries, in every language, in every society you can find. They exist - the damned writer, given a gift that will go unheeded, that will go untasted, like a fire hydrant popped open by kids in the summer and left to drain out into the streets. There is no protection from this. There is no such thing as job security as a writer. There is no such thing as a job as a writer. There are jobs you can do as a writer, but it goes beyond a paycheck, goes beyond an office or cramped cubicle or desk at home. It is a lifestyle, a yearning in the bowels of your soul, a burning that can only be quelled by getting your words out and even then, only for as long as the words are coming out. You'll stop writing and feel satisfied and then you'll burn again, feel the itch of innovation at the back of your neck, your brain tossing in your head like a listless dreamer in bed a night.
I can't translate that to a dollar sign. I can't be bothered to follow the path of a writer in it's conventional terms. I see books from writers all the time, serial writers, the same themes, the same characters hashing out the same plot lines or new ones with old twists. The same detectives after the same criminal. The same star-crossed lovers in a bind that works it's way out in the end, either in elation or tragedy. The same action thriller where you turn the page and the whole story collapses and is made new again by the whims of the writer seeing like Tiresias into the blackness, telling stories from blind eyes of a world that doesn't exist. I've been reading John Varley a lot lately on the suggestion of my girlfriend and I love his writing style but he leaves little else for his characters to grow, as if all of his stories are the stories of one universe in many books. Just picks a new person in those worlds and goes from there, adding new things here and there to spice it up. It robs each story of their individuality and yet, they are still captivating and amazing stories. And I don't know how. I don't know how the old dogs learn new tricks. I don't know how plot and common strife will prevail yet again. I listen to music and the same song sings from every song. Love. Life. War. All that is wrong in the world. All that is right. We can hear it sung, spoken and written to us thousands of times with new ears, eyes and minds each time and it still draws us back.
I don't know where it all leads to. I don't know which road it points to or where that road goes. What are we all hinting around? What is all of our inspiration shadowing? There seems to be constants everywhere I look. There are new ways to say it but there keeps on repeating in all of these things a message from existence itself it seems, something we're not understanding I guess. Some kind of morse code lost in the dazzle of Mona Lisa's silent eyes or the beauty of Cumming's wordart or the thrill in Beethoven's musical gestures. You don't even have to go to the masters for it - just look at the common man's writing. Look at the everyday blogs and journals of your fellow man. There is some yearning in there - we're all looking for the same end to all of our means, like a batch of children on an easter egg hunt through all of life.
When will we find what we don't know we're looking for?
BMC
What did you just say? - What's he gonna say next?
