I wrote this because I wrote all this.  That is, more or less, a kind of Kerouac explanation, like the beautiful end of On The Road, and the version he reads for Steve Allen on TV, which comes from Visions of Cody, actually, "I think of Dean Moriarty."  "Looking out over the old broken-down river pier..."  It's something you remember lines from, for its lyricism, a true poetic treat that might last you years.  And after reading the whole thing, this lyricism is welcomed by the poor reader who made it through, all the madness, all the meetings, all the crazy people.  The prose speaks of an effort, a great one.

One of the first pieces I wrote, as I came up with the idea of using this form, evokes the same river I go and stand over most days now, and still with the airplanes coming in and out.  The primeval life, the jungle growth, the river itself.

Now when I go out at night, it takes me about two, maybe three blocks along the sidewalks of my neighborhood before it opens up into a little meadow with good sized trees giving their protection.  The deer stand and watch me warily as I walk by, and half the time they don't run away, and sometimes one will barely even notice my passing, as I might be listening to something on my earbuds.  John Prine songs, after he passed, when I went and sat on a damp picnic bench and looked straight out over the full moon night river at the trees on the Virginia side as if I was watching the TV news.

Last night I brought my guitar, my Martin D-28 down in its case, along with all the wine I had left, in a Hemingway type Pamplona Iruna wineskin I believe my mom gave me as a gift once.  I put the capo on it, up at the ninth fret, to play a Lyle Lovett song, "If I had a boat..."  as I'd found a little clip on YouTube, of John Prine introducing the man about to play that song.   The Chianti, when I opened it a week before was undrinkable.  But somehow being open a week I was better able to get its thrust, an exotic spiciness, clove, chocolate, roots, coming through a slightly oxidized robe, not exactly pleasant, but drinkable, and all I had anyway.  I'd played a bit of the same song, around three AM, and the neighbor next door, fond of making his own noises and slamming doors and toilet seats, issued a complaint to my poor overworked friend Nell at the real estate company office, such that I got an email, about the third one over a year long period.  Could be worse.  So, I'm being a good boy, taking my beautiful guitar, the guitar of Hank Williams, and Elvis, and John Prine, and many many other a musician, down in its special molded plastic protective case on my walk with my wine skin down to play it so I won't offend anyone in this old building.

It's nicer to hear the wind blowing up in the old pines and the elms and the sugar maple, and when the wine tastes good, it tastes good.  Just like it feels good to write a sentence, to hold off for another day, the sense of all the things that could happen, and it's nighttime anyway, and so you let your mind rest in the form of the meditations that come with discovering sentences, one after another.  The whole world has gotten so complicated, so tight, so full of rules and orders and the things of common sense and practicality which one must follow, follow if you don't want you and your old mom to be tossed out on the street, with all your mighty piles of good books, but there still is that little chink of light that the caged will seek.

I have nothing important to say.  The wind is up, as it was earlier, when I took a walk at 4:40 in the afternoon, pulling and pushing at the small apartment building's windows.  I noted a limb of one of the big pines from about half way up had snapped off.  I stopped to snap off a small branch of the pine with its needles but the little branch was so green and wet still that it would not break.  Such pines have their ways.  The grounds are always soft under pines, more than the litter of needles might account for, as if pines had their own way of informing the soils around, a different kind of cooperative endeavor than that asked for by other trees and other forests.  Different personalities.

What is the river doing now?  There were ripples of waves on it earlier, rarely seen.  And now the moon, past two days full, is out my window, which faces south east.  The rabbit in it is looking upward, and the sky is clear black.

I am driving up to visit mom tomorrow.  I was over at my brother's house the day before, to go through his mail, to get the important things off to him, but even when I help, I feel inadequate, vulnerable in my adulthood, part of it from that long habit of just getting by, postponing, as a young fellow with some notion of being an important writer in his head would meander in some job, some job that gave him an excuse of gathering material.  I mow my brother's square of backyard lawn with the push mower, and it takes running starts to get through the thick overgrown grass and clover weeds.  Grass stains and sweat.  The heat of tree pollen on my face...


It's easier to be outside, I find.  In the small quarters of a one bedroom apartment's confines it is hard to take out any idea without it too feeling trapped, shriveled by the oversight of all the little tasks one should be doing, finances to work out, plans, resumes, job applications, new educations.  Bags to pack.  The agonies of Kerouac.


Of the writer's work, I tend to think that most would find it fair to ask, "What the hell are you doing?  What are you thinking?"  And you go about your meandering ways, picking up little bits of material even in a seemingly barren field.  What would you yourself know;  do you know of other fields, less barren?  You probably see them in other people's lives, but then again, they don't have the time.  Better served by reading.

What the hell are you doing?  You go for a walk, just to let a free thought come back, while letting it stay free.  Somewhere John Prine is hanging out out the back door of Armadillo World Headquarters, and telling a story of how you'd meet someone and talk music and end up spending a week there (but in the night, probably with a buzz of some kind, and a beer.)

So I do laundry, finding in the night a small spider running in fright on my bedspread, and unfortunately it could well be a brown recluse, and the scar of a bite from ten months ago is still on my left leg at the quadriceps, and I have to kill the thing, which I do not like to do, not one bit.  I sort some socks, and go back to the Tennessee episode of Ken Burns The Civl War, Shiloh.

You have to pack the little suitcase tonight, or tomorrow, before the road.  What else to take?  How long will I be gone?

The night is peace.  An allowance of an equilibrium, where thoughts are on the wind up in the boughs and branches.  I like the night to last.  Before the light of day comes rising, clomping up upon you, with things to do.  The quiet, to match.  At two in the morning, one still has some room.  I look up at the flat screen, a picture of open air tents where Grant and Sherman might have held their offices, a pine tree, an oak, chairs, grassland, smaller tents, private quarters, white, tables in the shade.  The photographer's lens has shut, just betraying a hint of a breeze swaying a distant poplar, upward through the pines.

I'm being irresponsible.

There's nothing you'll ever win as a writer.  No particular goal to achieve.  No summit to climb toward, but the one that is there every day along with everything else.  You'll win a few.  You'll lose far more.

This is the great peace you find at the opening passages of Slaughterhouse Five, that odd sense of purpose that came unexpectedly, serious, when the writer stops, to visit his old war buddy, as if to cash in on a war story, for the movie pictures, but the friend's wife comes in, as they drink their whiskey in the kitchen, to tell them the truth, of how they were just kids then, teenagers, jerks, more or less.  The simplest of admissions, "I'm going to write a book," and then on, from where it actually goes, not to the imagined great battle, the bridge of glory, the riches, the chicks, the perfect sense of justice of doing in the bad guy, but the rest, the real things, the sad unpreparedness of life's different points such as the writer has an eye for, expanding them so that they are real.

I can still tell my mom of the beauty of life.  She can still see it.  All that is still there, but weighed upon now.  And I must bring rubbing alcohol wherever I go, to wipe down things one touches, and one's hands, to make things antiseptic and clean.