Free-Writing I

10/22/10 12:15 pm-

A few days ago I woke up in the middle of the night, or maybe it was the morning, about 4 am and I looked over at my wife sleeping there to my right, and I looked down at my dog, our small Pomeranian mix Frankie who weighs seven pounds and six of it is attitude. It was quiet and peaceful, really peaceful, and I knew I had to get up for work in a few hours but I didn’t care. It normally would spoil the moment, push feeling into my stomach pit, a dread for my job, which always happens but especially when you don’t like your job. But this time, it didn’t effect me. I don’t know why I was impervious in that way on that morning, but so I was. I had the distinct feeling in that moment that I loved my life. Not my job, of course, and not our debt and the absence of end in sight to that and other problems, but my life, the one I’d created for myself. I chose the right person for me, or had the right one chosen for me depending on how you feel about fate, which I feel mixed but generally positive about, in agreeance, believing that it does exist but not to use it as an excuse for why things happen, simply as a way to smile at them when they do. So whatever it was, fate, choice, all that combined, came together to make a life that I appreciate, that I love. I knew in that moment that I had friends off sleeping somewhere who I valued as people, who were smart people, funny people, good people, that I’d surrounded myself with a wall of quality. I knew in that moment that while I don’t enjoy the company of my family, being so different from, feeling so alien, so wrong, so childish, so something, I knew that I did love them and that they were also good people. The apartment was right, if for now. The things I spent my time on, enjoyable, at times worthwhile. I had the passing feeling that I liked the person I was if for nothing else than I was a sum of those things. Even if my mind may be off, and my way of dealing with people can be flawed, that my anxieties hinder me and make me odd, even if I’m self-conscious and bizarre I’ve still managed to attract and keep these things around me long enough to let them define me, and I believed, in that moment, and now, and hopefully always, that that should mean something, and so it does.

It feels good to let go. I know that this project is a daunting one but I think it’ll be great for me, great practice, build up the muscle memory of free-flow, turn off the inner editor until later on, when it can come out and thrash and knife. This is how I need to write. I need to grow the grass and then cut it. A terrible analogy, but what I mean is, perhaps better, to make the block of ice first, then take a chainsaw to it. That probably sounds better. Fifty-thousand words is a lot of words but it’s not like I can’t repeat any. I wonder how many words I’ve written in my lifetime, not a fully grand total but just the ones for literature's sake, enjoyment, language, not the ones for work but for me. I wonder if I’ve succeeded at hitting the ten-thousand hour rule as defined by Malcolm Gladwell. I’ve absolutely spent hundreds of hours doing it, and I feel it could be up in the thousands. The ten-thousand hour rule has to do with being not just good, but great, but I don’t think it should be something to look at like, hey, I hit ten-thousand, now I’m a genius. Of course that’s because I was born a genius. No, really. We’re all born geniuses is what I mean, not to say that I’m full of myself, but I think that kids are capable of the most brilliant thoughts and wordings and ways of being, that in an adult would be crazy and what’s the word for crazy with money, eccentric, yes, and just the way they live is in a constant state of brilliance that at some point we shed along the way like an old shell for the next kid to come across and move into, and I think the struggle, always, the struggle is to get back to that point, let go, go mad, and I’m really trying very hard to lose my mind. If I could lose my mind I’d be set. People would point at me and say, “Look at the incredible way he went insane. I’ll pay to see that.” And then I’ll have a career being insane, but with structure, always with structure. No one wants to see a man painting the wall with his shit, but hey, some artists do so I shouldn’t even say that, but in general people want to see a very refined madman. Jack Nicholson is a perfect example. I’m positive that Jack Nicholson is insane, he just happens to be really good at it and really charming, and what is charm if it’s not egomania, and people just love to watch him, love to be around him, tap into that energy, hoping to absorb the power he has. All the best actors, comedians, writers, and possibly directors, photographers, designers and so on are all insane. I think that’s why they all move to one place, so the normals will stop judging them and they can relax among the people who are just like them, maybe worse, and that’s fine because it’s better to keep them all in one place where we can keep track of them. So I think what I’m saying is I need to be tagged and tracked too, because there’s good money in it.

-12:45 pm, 30 mins, approx 1,013 words