![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Road to Unity
Jun. 2nd, 2011 01:51 amI don’t know how but I did it. I finished the bitch, despite weathering nonstop cycles of bad news, bad drama and bad luck in the process. Emboldened by my father’s recent good fortune (all things considering), I came home and immediately descended on the work in a possessed fury. Hammered out the last edit and nailed down the final revision just over an hour ago.
Exhausted now. Beat - by which I mean Huncke fatigued and karma drained, and in no way to be confused with beaten. The Road to Unity was fraught with peril and it will be a long time before I’ve fully paid off all those tolls I crossed on a currency of I.O.U.'s. A slow-motion, grudge-fuck tango was what it was… every step of the way up and out of the depths of a bottomless desperation.
Yet when I pictured this moment arriving years ago, wish-willing it into existence with my poor-man’s-sigil-magick, the scene played radically different. It was straight out of a Fellini film – a crowded room vibing with pure eclectricity. The bar jukebox hijacked and blasting some serious get-down shit. Joints lit up in defiance of the No Smoking signs. Drinks liberally poured into my mouth by monstrously breasted women. Spontaneous orgies erupted in the packed bathrooms. Drunken vows were cast recklessly into the ‘fire of the blood’. But best of all there was a collective recognition from my friends that their faith, their trust, their help… was not in vain. At the end of it all, Love would take me by the hand and through her shadowy mercies, I would be delivered finally that elusive satisfaction that yearns at the heart of my humble art.
Instead, I sit here at the computer. Lights all out except the soft blue glow of the monitor. Ambient music drones faintly through cheap headphones. My lady asleep, my friends distant, vanishing one by one it would seem… and my celebration limited to my last bowl. My ‘Suicide Bowl’ as I like to call it. I always pretend that I’m going to save it for right before the zombies get me. Heh. Anyway, Victory is a quiet mistress it would seem. Her silence louder than both my imaginary revelries and my exaggerated trials combined.
But just because I’m to be denied a celebration, do not think that I have not received a prize. It may be but a consolation, but it's mine nonetheless.
Through the wake of the recent devastation, I see clearly that my horizons have been expanded with a terrible confidence. It is there in the fire eating away at the fat from the inside. It is there in the endurance that rises when the damage begins to sink beneath the numb. It is there in this newfound strength discovered now that the will is finally unshackled from the cast iron chains of doubt. It is there in a wisdom, scarred and weary, but whose words no longer come timid and too late.
My prize is that I made it this far and that's more than enough.
Not many folks can survive the trip. They give up after the first draft, the first page, the first sentence. Some have even had their books noose dangle perpetually on the crossroads of a simple title alone. Most are lucky enough if they even get the chance to try. So instead of a celebration, a quiet promise, to keep going, to not get soft and make the next book better than the last.
Until then, I’ll leave you with this.
Some of the best advice I ever got on writing was from an old gutter punk up in Philly - "When they say 'Write the way people talk', try to remember that it's not an excuse to sound like an asshole!"
Exhausted now. Beat - by which I mean Huncke fatigued and karma drained, and in no way to be confused with beaten. The Road to Unity was fraught with peril and it will be a long time before I’ve fully paid off all those tolls I crossed on a currency of I.O.U.'s. A slow-motion, grudge-fuck tango was what it was… every step of the way up and out of the depths of a bottomless desperation.
Yet when I pictured this moment arriving years ago, wish-willing it into existence with my poor-man’s-sigil-magick, the scene played radically different. It was straight out of a Fellini film – a crowded room vibing with pure eclectricity. The bar jukebox hijacked and blasting some serious get-down shit. Joints lit up in defiance of the No Smoking signs. Drinks liberally poured into my mouth by monstrously breasted women. Spontaneous orgies erupted in the packed bathrooms. Drunken vows were cast recklessly into the ‘fire of the blood’. But best of all there was a collective recognition from my friends that their faith, their trust, their help… was not in vain. At the end of it all, Love would take me by the hand and through her shadowy mercies, I would be delivered finally that elusive satisfaction that yearns at the heart of my humble art.
Instead, I sit here at the computer. Lights all out except the soft blue glow of the monitor. Ambient music drones faintly through cheap headphones. My lady asleep, my friends distant, vanishing one by one it would seem… and my celebration limited to my last bowl. My ‘Suicide Bowl’ as I like to call it. I always pretend that I’m going to save it for right before the zombies get me. Heh. Anyway, Victory is a quiet mistress it would seem. Her silence louder than both my imaginary revelries and my exaggerated trials combined.
But just because I’m to be denied a celebration, do not think that I have not received a prize. It may be but a consolation, but it's mine nonetheless.
Through the wake of the recent devastation, I see clearly that my horizons have been expanded with a terrible confidence. It is there in the fire eating away at the fat from the inside. It is there in the endurance that rises when the damage begins to sink beneath the numb. It is there in this newfound strength discovered now that the will is finally unshackled from the cast iron chains of doubt. It is there in a wisdom, scarred and weary, but whose words no longer come timid and too late.
My prize is that I made it this far and that's more than enough.
Not many folks can survive the trip. They give up after the first draft, the first page, the first sentence. Some have even had their books noose dangle perpetually on the crossroads of a simple title alone. Most are lucky enough if they even get the chance to try. So instead of a celebration, a quiet promise, to keep going, to not get soft and make the next book better than the last.
Until then, I’ll leave you with this.
Some of the best advice I ever got on writing was from an old gutter punk up in Philly - "When they say 'Write the way people talk', try to remember that it's not an excuse to sound like an asshole!"