To Blog Somewhere

New. Well, this is the first time I have had a chance to sit at my computer and write as I used to do. Location is an incredibly important part of any writer’s ability to do what he or she does: what was Walden but the perfect environment for Thoreau, what is Starbuck’s but the perfect environment for people writing on their laptops, and what would Hunter S. Thompson be without his amphetamine-crazed glancings around a room full of booze and drugs and news clippings. It’s always difficult to say how a new environment will influence the way one writes, but I guess we’re back to the old experimentation stage—which can oftentimes be awfully sublime…something I’m very interested in.

So, from the wild confines of the freedom of New York City, to the uncomfortable independence of Kansas City, the land of my birth, I manage to make my way. Funny that. But funny also that I have now lived a full third of my life away from this city and I feel at once as if I belong and I don’t.

There are no lowball glasses in my parents house. I’m not sure how to feel in a world without pint glasses, lowball glasses, martini glasses, and general alcohol paraphernalia. That sounds bad, I guess, but the reality is that these are just things you have around the house. How does one explain it? It is not as if there is binging every night on cheap booze and passing out with your head spinning a little bit as was so common during the college years, this is a more respectful relationship with alcohol. You know what it can, and what it can’t, do, and doing is just so important. When it comes to most things in this world, it is simply the doing of them that matters, the particulars of the performance are most generally of little consequence.

“I played The Garden.”
“Oh. How’d it go?”
No. That conversation doesn’t happen, and even if it does, it would be fatuously ended by a brief, “Oh, you know, pretty good.”

It doesn’t matter how it went. It doesn’t matter when your pants are on inside out when you are sitting in the comfort of your own home. It just doesn’t. It’s true. It doesn’t matter if you stand on a chair swinging your Johnson (yes, that’s a Johnson) around like some kind of weird puppet show starring an earthworm and a couple of clumps of dirt because you are in your home, and it doesn’t really matter how weird you are when you’re alone.

You do get into a sticky area there, though, because it is entirely possible that weirdness is a sign of mental instability—or at least the baseline of some kind of social deficiency. You’re missing something when ALL you want to do is stand on a chair swinging your downstairs around in the shape of a cross saying E nomini patri, et Fili e spiritu sancti, or you’ve got something extra, and either way, you’re dealing with some deviation from the norm.

Things seem to mean so much, yeah? Or is that just me? Sunsetwatching could be the name of my religion. Every sunset means that what just happened is in the log books and cannot be undone, while it simultaneously means that a brand new day is on the way. I watched a friend of mine this evening as he fed his three-month-old baby girl, and realized that the fathering, mothering, caretaking, growing, developing, loving, and feeding another human being can be a spiritual experience. I would imagine that it develops a part of our soul that can be developed in no other way, and that is why it is such a significant event. Your life is forever changed in that moment. I am, obviously, excluding those folks that don’t care, because they honest aren’t worth thinking about. If you can’t understand the effect you can and will have on that person’s life, you probably shouldn’t have one to begin with. There is a possibility that it will force that part of the soul to develop, but that seems like an incredible crapshoot. If you go into it with the wrong attitude you will be a bad parent, and a bad parent is nothing more than a parent who can be apathetic to their offspring. Love them, hate them, show them the spectrum, but don’t do nothing.

Jesus, what was all that about. Maybe I’m just taking notes for when (and I’m gonna throw a big IF in here) that happens in my life. This suddenly seems to be the most overtly journal-type entry I’ve ever made, but we’re back to history at that point, and it can be extremely lucrative to have those bits of history to look back on and say, “O, I totally remember that frame of mind.” Which is important, because my frame of mind is like something out of an experimental novel by an unknown author.

But we’re working back to equilibrium, now. The fingers are once again dancing across the stages of the keyboard and putting words together to form sentences and sentences together to form some kind of meaning, as all words mean something when put into the context of other words. It can’t help but mean something, right? The only thing that can mean something is something done, and doing things usually takes the form of revolution. Daily revolution, a guide to keeping life interesting in twelve easy chapters. The future is unknowable, keep your head up. The bill may be a factor, as you have no money to pay for it, but you can’t really be all that worried about it, they plan on this kind of thing happening. As a matter of fact, they hope it will. They are so far removed from it that they couldn’t care less. Your couple of hundred bucks on the bill is really only a big deal to you because you feel like you owe somebody something and that that means something, but the reality is that you owe a couple of hundred bucks to a corporation that only barely cares about your interaction with it because they’ll get what’s theirs one way or another. From you or another source. You’re not putting them out of business.

Good god what a lot of drivel this has turned out to be, but I suppose that there are days when the brain absolutely has to just flush itself of the insanity that is wildly racing through it. I wish I dreamt more. Three of the people I love most in the world dream multiple times a week. I get, at MOST, one a month, and usually more like one a year—obviously these are the dreams that I remember even vaguely. I dreamt consistently one time. They were scary and I’d rather not be there. Am I running away from my dreams to pursue them in reality?