Enjoy The Silence. Do The Work.
An invocation for beginnings. A place somewhere between zero and one.
Why is there human shit everywhere.
It can bring us to tears as much as it can produce genuine euphoria.
I’ve sung myself hoarse as much as I’ve just needed to be where other people are not.
I’m happy we live in a world where this is possible.
But lately I’ve come to a place of peace with understanding that what I do for money is not what I do for love.
I’ve conflated these for the past thirty years. I suppose some people never uncouple them.
The more tenured I get, the less and less I write, focusing on making fewer words matter more.
Each fragment remembered both end and beginning.
Every morning it’s the same. Whatever was going on behind my eyes during the night is gone.
A limbic space between down here and up there. Down there and up here.
Stepping over the horror of life as we choose instead the horror of like and subscribe. Distracted and ourselves distraction. The bull will bleed out, become bone and blow away in the dust.
She wasn’t a loner, but she was alone.
The two had immediately seen themselves in each other. And the socials grew.
To those of us who followed, it was never clear what their relationship was. Which is why we liked and subscribed for more.
They laughed and sought the sunrises we could only dream of.
They joined camel trains in Morocco and hopped steam trains in Senegal. We all thirsted after their lives.
Both accounts fell silent, and after a week our concern had swiftly turned to a unique kind of digital indifference.
None of us really knew them, and for most of us they were just another hole in the stream.
Over time their accounts would lay as dormant as our memories of them.
Nobody could ever be sure when the planes started to behave strangely, but the signs were always there.
Cleveland air traffic control was the first to notice the strange signals happening between domestic flights.
So it slowly, but steadily, began the series of incidents tailored towards the increasing human removal of those no longer aligned with the mission of cost-cutting and revenue retention.
Cabins in coach would mysteriously depressurize, asphyxiating all inside. Windows would blow out for no reason.
But now, as the blackest jaws of the escape rose up to meet him, the darkness which had plagued him since that night had a new purpose… relief.
It’s not that I became indifferent. I just became uninvested. Nor did I become lazy. I just became interested in everything else.
But that I had enough. That I was enough.
And in that enoughness I’d found a space of happiness.
A place I could indulge all the things I wanted to do, even if most of them started by doing nothing.
The work to go just that little bit further out into the ocean than was comfortable each time.
That place where my feet no longer touched the floor.
But also a place where the peace of doing nothing was also the work.
The work of just listening. Of just calming a racing mind.
The boy with the dip killed the shark with the spear.
The past does not pay the bills of the present. His teeth now rotted out of his head, he still wonders who died on the beach.
Ever since I’ve been caught in a limbic space between apple and brotherly love.
An immigrant’s love of a place where I began again.
The weightlessness which comes from self-inflicted uprooting.
The doctor called it controlled loneliness.
Not a spiritual place but still a space of ritual.
Sometimes nothing comes. Sometimes it all comes at once.
Practice. Persevere. Crack it open. Get out of bed. Go that little bit further out into the water.
Enjoy the silence. Do the work.
No-one was looking at the work, everyone was just looking at each other.
Who they could talk to. How might it further things for them. Where were we all going afterwards.
It was all just such bullshit heaped upon bullshit.
The work was bullshit.
The way it got made was bullshit. Who knew who and why was bullshit.
Kid yourself you have a network of support. Exhaust favors.
Eat beans on toast three days a week. Eat shit.
Are you happy? You seem so fucking miserable all the time and I don’t mean the tortured artist thing.
When I got home I wrote all night. I wrote like I was running out of time. I wrote for myself and to others. I got to work.
It seems to me that everything I write here sits in the sink until its time comes.
Other times they pile up, the traces of a busy schedule or the lethargy of a procrastinating soul.
The dishes are attached to me. In me. On me.
These plates are the ones with often the most painful of memories. The dishes which are at the bottom of the pile for a reason.
