Lately I have been spending my days doing this sleep gap work. I cannot rest through the night. I found myself at 4 am yesterday driving around in a part of town I have never seen. My car, taylor’s old one, sucks. The a/c doesn’t stay right. I don’t know. I only hate it when its 110 degrees. I was looking around at nothing and everything. Lately, the nights seems like a day without end. I do like the quiet, though. There were places, when I stopped, that I could hear the cicadas. This one spot was deafening almost. I pulled over and put the windows down. I can’t remember what was on the radio. Gripping the steering wheel with both hands, I got a weird feeling. I felt like I was at some drive in movie, waiting alone in my truck. I sat and listened to those bugs. Wow. The ruckus was indeed massive. I wish I could find them. When I was a kid I would look for the cicadas in the trees or bushes but no matter where the sound I couldn’t find them. I am not sure if they are all over the country or wherever any person reading this lives.
Next subject. Writers. Books. I don’t really know any current ones. I did read this book by Raymond Chandler on a recent flight. He writes like a long kiss. No, its not a gay thing. He makes these small, concise sentences but the resonation, man the resonation makes me still. Any of his books are good, in my opinion. I tend to read rock biographies or music related books. I just read that new beastie boys book. Its alright. Just some talking heads type interviews. No real narrative in my opinion but enough snippets to get a better picture. I always wanted to write a book. In fact I did once, but like all 19 year old guys who discover Rimbeau, I thought to free myself I had to burn it. And while I am sure its masturbatory worth would definitely ping through the starbucksian pantheon of ‘must reads,’ I seem to recall a great deal of “no one understands me, I gotta be drunk” and other third rate bukowski epithets. So no great slight to the literary world, right? But I do soldier on. I have 24 pink recipe cards with the plot to my play about a guy who works in a store. Think roadhouse meets cobb..no its more clash of the titans meets ghost. Hell. I have carried those cards around with me-even to Russia and not taken them out of the rubber band around them. I look for inspiration. I really do. Sometimes, when I am up late at night, I can write. But I don’t. sometimes when she calls or I call her, I feel like some words should fall out. But they don’t. I see stuff too. I hear things. Things that would be great in my meatloaf of words. But I don’t use them. I should. Right. I mean if people will buy books about codes and that grassy knoller Stephen King can poop out a story and get tom hanks in the movie, then I should put out a book myself.
Maybe that’s what I will do. 200 pages. Self published. With a fancy spellcheck. No editor. Not yet. Just a first printing of I don’t know how many. Whats enough without being too much.
Maybe I will write it about FS. Or that girl JW. I used to paint her. We never spoke. Except the first and last time we spoke. She was unattainable. So was FS. Religious, together, well-groomed. Her parents had a checking account; she wore a blue raincoat.
I always find myself letting people into me, my space when I start to talk about V. or W.
Anyhow, V and W and I had some times. Somethings. Days. I think W and I saw each other everyday for 4 years.
This morning I watched some lame movies. I did tear up, water and all, during the endish part of Singles, where Bridget Fonda sneezes. I also watched and became personally involved in this Nick Cannon movie “Underclassmen.” I always loved the young cop who goes back to high school to nail the bad guy plot. This movie also has the crappy accountant guy from Notting Hill(high on the tin tears hit list) as the bad guy.
Skipping around and not really with rhyme, I saw the last place I saw my mother before she passed. I drive by this spot all of the time. I have for years. We were in the kitchen, which was full of trash. That whole apartment was a war zone. I used to have to walk through adam’s room to go to the restroom. Sometimes I saw people doing things, sometimes I just saw adam. I was leaving town the next morning, I had sold everything-except for the Gus bus. She was coming by to bring the last moustache over to look at my car. My dead father had turned up in recent months so I was on my way to Illinois, to a real college, to less than 3 jobs and some normalcy. You would not believe what I found in Illinois. That’s another story when I have the nouns. Yeah. It was one of those goodbyes that in retrospect you knew was the last one when it happened. She seemed smaller, uglier, more broken down than I ever remembered. If I could smell her, I would imagine there to be a tangle of aquanet, menthol cigarettes and whatever dimestore toilet water the moustache covered himself in. I remember her talking and crying about the lies and stuff. I didn’t really listen. It was too late. The ten year old me would have bought the whole story and even sent away for the tshirt (if I had the money). I was done. Over it. Couldn’t have cared less. You know, almost what, 18 years later, I would still rewrite it that way, word for word. So the moustache came in and said something about my car being worth 150 cash. Cool. Pay up. Here’s the keys. See you guys. I watched her turn and she slid me some letter. A 4 page apology for the way I grew up. For all the uncles and times I slept in the woods. For that shed my friend’s mom pretended to not notice I stayed in most of the time. She apologized for it all. My pulse never fluttered either way. I never let it get on my radar. I teared up about that car, that 78 corolla liftback that leann’s mom sold to me so I could have somewhere to rest and be able to get to my jobs. I know where that letter is, right now. Two rooms away, buried under my 6th grade yearbook (that was 12 bushels of spinach at 50 cents a bushel, a bushel being 18 pounds. Neato math).
Some years later, in the middle of leaving my wife, trying to keep sane, I read the letter. We are supposed to evolve, to grow, to become these enlightened earth mothers but I just read it and went quantum leap back into 1979. This isn’t a ploy to elicit pity or oh poor blogger type attention. I just thought about that place. Where we last saw each other.
