Stifft Station Days (2004)

When we look back at it all, as I know we will--you and me, wide-eyed--I wonder, will we really remember how it feels to be this alive? And I know we have to go, I realize we only get to stay so long....always have to go back to real life, where we belong.

Real Life is six days away. Real Rent, Real Job, Real Responsibilities. Real Bullshit.

I've been living here in the Treehouse for one year and almost three months now, which was time enough. I'm typing this in the southwest corner of this small, steepled carriage house at 116 1/2 Johnson Street in Stifft Station--the ceiling is dripping fat raindrops onto a towel I've wedged strategically between the computer and the wall. The mulberry tree outside is beginning to fill out in gnarled and spiny fruits, which may be edible before Friday, my moving day. If they are, I'm bagging some up and taking them with me. It's not so much that they're particularly tasty fruits as it is that the act of picking fruit from a tree in your backyard just feels...good.

I've been wanting to reread the "Time Passes" section of To the Lighthouse, but am almost afraid of what I'll read there. Staring out the tall, rickety window into the city blackness last night, I realized that this is about to become my life. Day in and out, working and doing duties and making money and balancing budgets and applying for things and getting turned down and trying and failing and, shit, that water is dripping on the desk now. If I get electrocuted I want it to be a little more poetic than that, thank you. Still, I would've gone while writing about the banality of my impending transition into the "adult world". That has to count for something...

Thinking of starting an advice column in the UALR paper called "Ask Charon"...questions about dealing with death, loss, and other inevitabilities. But I doubt that I'll follow up on that. Still, I'm hoping that one thing on which I WILL follow up is keeping up with this journal. So far, I've not given out the URL to anyone, which should keep me from typing with others in mind. That's one of the problems I've had in journalizing (what an awkward word. Damned Rhetoric and Communications course--shudder) previously: integrity. I wind up pooping out weak entries of little substance that always sound forced. But when I think about it, writing is almost always going to be as futile as anything else at "capturing" whatever it is we try to capture. Like moments, all writing goes by one word at a time, no matter how quickly you read or think ("once a page is read, all but love is dead"). You can read the same sentence a hundred times, but will it really be reborn, or just regurgitated? I could publish something every year of my life, and it won't expand my mortal self, nor diminish my immortality any further.

So why do I want to write? Because it feels good. I could compare writing to oral sex (giving OR receiving): the idea isn't always appealing, and the act can be laborious at times, but if you don't THINK too much while you're doing it, the process itself (from any angle) is as extraordinary and pleasing as the eventual release.

I suppose that the time has come to stand up, stretch, shower and struggle to shave my legs without slipping or taking ANOTHER slice out of my leg (four weeks and it's still a pretty ugly cut--bled for three days...). Then to work, sloshing around cylinders full of poison and meeting desperate eyes as empty at the end of the night as the glasses into which they dip and drown.

Once more into the breach, dear friends.