Some Safety Glass Distance (2013)

I didn’t set out to write about blogging this morning but that’s where I find myself at a peculiar hour in a most peculiar place.  I guess what I’m really writing about is not writing at all, which sadly has been the case for quite some time now – here or elsewhere.  You see, writing is in my blood, it makes me feel connected to an often overwhelming sense of disconnectedness.  In the absence of this creative umbilical cord I get lost in the grand wide openness and I spin out of control.  Gone is the artificial atmosphere of creativity, the community of process, the skate park roller rink universe of familiarity and safety that comes from bringing an idea into being.  There are other reasons that make it vital, of course; I became a filmmaker for many of the same aspirations; to belong and to create, to say something, to explore, to cohort and commiserate.  That is why the absence has had a profoundly troubling effect on me, simultaneously robbing my art and ideas while disfiguring my being, uplifting my everything – turning it over and over and not in a tornado-starting-over-good-sort-of-way either.  It is true, you can create from absolute ruin but only after you’ve gotten over on the other side, put it in your rear-view-mirror, machined perspective with safety glass distance.  Until then, it’s absolutely everything consumed by rubble and ruin.  But like I said, I didn’t set out to write about this this morning.

I like to think that this moment is about all the moments that came before, the reminders and blinders revealing that life is often less and sometimes just a little bit more.  But in so doing, in the adding and subtracting I begin to come apart and the wrong solutions get in the way of the right feelings.  Like me setting out to write about all these things only to end up sidelined by an illness that would make a great movie if only it weren’t so hard living it.  Maybe I don’t let it out into the open enough, share the precursors to cliff side collisions.  That’s when I begin to understand the fragility of this threadbare gossamer gown that has been keeping me from slamming into the ground.  It’s almost used up, given a little too much in the wrong direction.  And the fledgling me, the falling down me, I keep looking for the way through, imagining it to pieces, through and through.

Writing is like falling in love, words and scribbles one at a time and then all at once, burning up in the heat of it, hung up on the last line waiting for the next eternity.  The next word is going to take you and leave you, stuck half way between what hasn’t happened yet and what you need more than anything in the world.

That reminds me.