today the trifecta: daughter throwing up through most of the night, the main sewer line backed up into the slop sink in the morning, the car wouldn’t start. by evening, cleared the sewer line, daughter was better, car most likely needs a new starter. at the very least it looks like the refinance thing is going to happen.
bad things in threes, one glimmer of hope.

It is a certain kind of magic: someone walks up to you and asks the right question. How did they know to ask? A woman approached me after a writing workshop. It was the first time I had ever been there. We were prompted to write something. What I wrote sounded like the beginning of a thriller. The woman who approached me asked a question about how her writing was influencing her. That what she was writing was very personal and depressing, she asked me how to work through that. Why did she ask me? What was it about what I wrote that told her that I understood that kind of writing? How did she know?

Waking up with a tune in my head I don’t want to hear anymore, dry cough and the shiver of a dying winter bullying its way through the house. This house, our house, will we keep it in the end? Plans to ditch the 401k for now, give yourself that raise only because we have to dig ourselves out of this somehow. After all, we weren’t planning on retiring in our forties now were we?

One more for the road, for old time’s sake, one more to close out the day. Something that woody allen said about philip glass: you can tell him you don’t like it and he says ok and will just throw it away. And you like that don’t you, the idea of prolificness, the idea that you have this ability to riff off of anything, that you can spin any mad set of words out of nothing and keep doing it for days.
Well obviously this will be a test of that.

I wear this tattoo for all the right reasons, that there is ground inwhich I cling to, there is something I stand on, there is a light at the end of this tunnel.

You need to do the things that sustain you, that surpass you: if not at work, then everything else. Read everything, study, go beyond, be beyond, allow yourself to grow out of the expectations of your place. Explore, write, listen, reach. You have arms boy for a reason: they are meant to grasp as well as throw away.

Days go by and not a word. No, that is not true, always words, incessantly, mantras, ghosts, whispers, in my head, always, I am never alone, always speaking, listening but hardly writing. Letting the body rest, feeding the soul.

in my youth i would look at pictures, i would weep for the child i had been, i would stare and my gaze would become muddled and burred, from despair i would beg “what happened to you?”

and i was reminded again of it, but this time, this time the child had answer, i begged him again the question “what happened to you?”

and he replied, “you lived.”

simple and true, i am nothing without the distance, i have seen, i have loved, i have despaired, i have danced, i have written, i have gone, i have betrayed, i have been betrayed, i have been loved, i have been abandoned, and all of it precious, all this accumulation, all these markers on a very long journey.

i’d rather have traveled the world than to remain.

It feels like it’s over, the harhness, the darkness, the bitter cold of a particularly brutal winter. I sit outside and catch the faint smell of spring, of renewal. She has renewed us, and yet I find myself asking, have you truly forgiven yourself? Are you ready to say goodbye to these ghosts of your failures? He says to me, does it ever occur to you to say, this is good enough? That you have are enough?

she says to me, i feel so out of touch sometimes.
i tell her, don’t worry about being out of touch
you will never be out of my reach
i will always pull you out to sea
for far away lands and distant locales
for the strange and the delightful
for the macabre and the unusual
and together, we will return to home
together, we will find the shore
she replies, you keep me in the world
you have always been my connection to the outside
and i wept. who is holding onto to whom?