This Writing Thing
b.r.crandall
is something. It’s therapy. An ever-growing collection of notebooks and pads cluttering my shelves, tables, and floors. Could definitely be used to build an enormous bonfire on a cold, October night. If so, I’ll be sure to bring the bourbon (although that’s not on my radar this month). Perhaps it’s only a tissue, what we splatter from our nose every time we sneeze or clear our nostrils - if only our mucus was as colorful as an Autumn sunset. I can’t help but think that it’s merely a speck upon a speck in some alien scientist’s petri dish. Hey, what’s this amoeba-thing doing on a laptop piano with a furry dog draped around his shoulders? He seems focused and serious moving his phalanges as he does. It’s something the Great Whatever cursed him with: an overactive brain asking questions and seeking solutions, knowing the answer will only come after he empties the ocean with his fork (what a madman…thank you, Richard Stine). This thing writing each and every day as he promised himself to do as a teenager. You remember when you were 19, living in London, dancing to Blues Traveler on the cobblestones of Wigmore with a walkman, knowing the music was always better upon Primrose Hill. We felt regent, though. Collegiate. Alive before a time of emails, texts, & Amazon trucks. We only had pens, paper, and international envelopes checkered with read & blue bricks. We read the greats wondering if we, too, would one day be King Lear (while trying to be the Fool) and listened to Paul Gilroy map out the colonial infrastructure of global politics - with stories few ever here…which were meant to be contained (perhaps this is why I keep revisiting Supacell on Netflix…the dire warnings make sense). This writing thing is a rub, only designed to pacify hubris in the short time our finger and toenails grow - our beards get white rather fast. As a kid, my grandmother collected our doodles, twirls of crayonic-scribbles meant to be dogs, toys, landscapes, Picasso. She’d keep these in her books, often adding her own markings and writing poems to bring the colors alive. And you bared witness with cheeks that were destined to grow fat, watching the way she found words to match the chaos of every page. You’ve always been drawn to language, stories, the way Dr. Seuss pitter-pattered possibilities and Silverstein made Runny Babbits leap from a library card (one of life’s greatest gifts). This writing thing….This writing thing. How else to begin each day and end it? To fill all the hours in-between? All of us walking shadows and poor players trapped by brain development, hormones, likes, and desire. Words are like ice-cubes to help tame the intellectual fire —-none of this matters in the end. We’re figments of an imagination arriving from another realm, needing gas for the roads more traveled and an ability to supersize our meals. Here I am again, out here, writing and adding debris to the cosmic chaos of the miraculously mundane (putting words to page to make me feel somewhat sane). This writing thing is why I write,
because I’d rather be wrong, tap-dancing to yet another song in my head…it’s a bad habit, likely, one that will continue until I’m dead.
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