I cobbled together pictures to include in this last November blog post, before December comes, and my life changes back again. Before my life changes forward.
I’m tired. We’re all tired. More than just body tired, although that’s a lot of it. The brain affects the body, and the body affects the brain. This world affects the brain AND the body. I’d like to think we all see that now. Remember that. Scrapbook that. And keep that scrapbook on the coffee table of our lives. Always handy. Always at hand [08:45].
[08:46] I don’t want to write any more than that on this subject. Not here, in this journal. Not now, before I get other things off my mind and out of my system. I have a lot to do. Not today, but very soon. Maybe even tomorrow, when there isn’t THIS to do. No, really, move off now. Move onto something, anything, else [08:50].”
That was the first page of the day, handwritten, before following my own orders for the day. Now, I’m making this up as I go. Gathering the images that meant the most to me over the last 30 days of NanoPoblano. Playing connect the dots with content, hoping that things end up where I want them on the page, and NOT like David Hedison’s head on the body of a fly, crying “Helllllp meeeee” before Vincent Price ended what would become Jeff Goldblum’s least appreciated SciFi reboot.
Oh yeah, help me. There’s a takeaway that I’ve tucked in my pocket on the way out the door of this November blog month, that reads loud and clear in the image above. That “sadness isn’t the only muse”. I vaguely wrote something in the neighborhood of that, in passing, somewhere inside the post with the Motorola Razr in the picture, about how, if I had released my next book back when all my motivation for writing was dark, sad, angry, drunken pain, it would’ve been utter and total shit. In the half-dozen years from the release of my last book until now, I’ve LIVED all the shit that needs to be lived, and lived through, before you can listen to another, better, muse.
Now, all there is to do is look forward. Thanks to all who read, wrote, or participated in any form they chose. These last 30 days have been my love poem to all of you. As someone who once wrote a poem about never again writing love poems, I hope you can appreciate the irony.
For now, I’m going to leave you with that thing I write at the end of most of my November posts. It might not be literal this time, but the wish is always on my heart.
It’s day twenty-nine and I didn’t get an early enough start.
I thought, as the day kept getting on with itself, and I wasn’t, that maybe there was something in the archives I could slap up on the blog, then take the rest of the day to come up with something fresh to end the month on, tomorrow.
A thought flashed across my mind; the remembrance of something I’d already written, a year or more ago. So I set myself to digging, and I found it. I did a few edits on it, because this poem I haven’t been able to let go of, and even submitted to a couple of places at the end of 2022, always felt bloated and croaky, like words coming out of someone who had spent a long winter with laryngitis, forgetting what their real voice sounded like.
I was about ready to copy and paste from Word Doc to WordPress, when the whisper of a thought floated in the space between bits and bytes.
“Is it, has it, was it, did I already… maybeeeee?”
Scroll-scroll-scroll on the blog, back, back, to day eleven. One loud exhale through pursed lips. One more click, and, and.
Damn.
See, my problem with writing is, well… that. Give it any name you want, it’s that my archives have kinda taken the form of a cave full of junk drawers, all piled up on each other, every drawer neatly labeled, but with descriptions that tell you absolutely nothing about what’s in them. It’s a filing system that could get you fired, if you were doing the filing for someone else. For me, I wouldn’t be surprised if I have upwards of a dozen different versions of poems, in various stages of editing. And even though this is a sort of funny story that will have a fun ending in another 50 words or so, over the days to come, I may have to address this problem before I move forward with the plan I blogged about only yesterday.
Or maybe I’ll just delete all of it, and start over again.
We’ll see.
But before I cross, or burn, that bridge when I come to it, here’s the thought I came up with to leave for you at the end of day twenty-nine. How about BOTH POEMS? Day eleven AND day twenty-nine, side by side, to show you what goes through my mind, every time I write a poem for submission. Call it the “what to leave in… what to leave out” according to Bob Seeger.
So, for my next-to-the-last day of NanoPoblano 2023, TWO versions of the same poem. Also, please tell me which one you like better in the comments. Because remember, there are no wrong answers, only wrong publishers to reject them.
Insert laughter here.
.
Half-Staff (day eleven)
I guess the next thing would be to outlaw flags at half-staff. That is,
if we’re not going to outlaw
their cause.
It would be easier to do that, because remembering the names of the dead is hard.
And just like every year I do this 30 day challenge, I fall short. Short of everything I wanted to write, and short of all the things that have been crowding my heart and mind for the previous year, stored up in such a way that, when the time came to let it all out, it got jammed up inside me like the dryer lint that gets stuck underneath your filter. A lint clog that, if left uncollected, could… at least according to the manufacturer, TikTok, and all the urban legends… burn your whole house down.
Then again, the stuff I wanted to write this November probably could’ve burned my whole house down, all by itself, if it hadn’t gotten stuck somewhere along the way to all your glowy screens.
So instead, I burn, on the inside.
I guess that means there’s more writing for me to do.
So instead of me curling up into a tightly-packed December ball, and covering my head until that next burst of creative energy shows itself sometime after the first of the year, when THIS December hits, my words will be ready to hit back. Plans are being made, and not just plans like laundry, or regular grooming and hygiene. I mean plans like “finish the damn book” and “start the next damn book”, along with “find me a publisher for BOTH damn books”. Plus, with the 2023 advent of my age-62-and-over, government cheese budget, let’s add “schedule the damn world tour with a suitcase full of the damn books” to go along with all the rest of it.
And this is your heads-up for what, besides laundry and hygiene, looks to be a busy year for me, including the usually underperforming month of December, just three days away. This gives me two more days with you before I lock the doors and draw the blinds, and knock out more words than the first of any year has held for me before.
Until right now.
Updates will be here on the blog, and all over the connected socials, when I know more.
“I think all poets… are caught in a situation, have a very difficult role to play. Insofar as they’re real poets, they are committed to the welfare of people, of all the people… Our effort is to bear witness to something which will have to be there when the storm is over. To help us get through the next storm. Storms are always coming.”
-James Baldwin (1970)
All poets bear witness.
Right there.
Full stop.
When I began writing poetry, I was already an old man. A meme I read the other day will tell you just how old,
“In banana years, I am bread.”
Not unlike a lot of my poet peers, peers, not in age, but in time served, I wrote poetry because I wanted to die; I just didn’t want to do the deed myself. Because of that fear of the great beyond, and my place in it, I chose instead to write the poison from my system, one shitty, self-indulgent poem at a time.
Almost a decade later, my first full-length book of shitty, self-indulgent poems was published, and two years later, a second. Then, within that same year, and with a third book of shitty, self-indulgent poems set to go to press, I had what I would call a poet’s epiphany. With a couple of weeks to go before my third book would be made available, I told my publisher no.
What I actually said was, “I’m pulling the book”. When asked why, my reply was, “Because it’s shit”. Now it’s five-and-a-half years later, and I still haven’t written book number three. Looking back on all the poems I have written from the beginning of 2018 until now, I believe I have done the world a great service, by simply not letting anyone read those poems, except in very small numbers, by only a few trusted individuals. It’s funny, at least funny to me, funny in a way that most people don’t see as funny, but whatever, that I am grateful that there is nothing come to print of anything I wrote during those five silent years, when circumstances mostly beyond my control afforded me a luxury that a more… accomplished… writer might not have been gifted.
Time enough to shut the fuck up, and listen.
Time to listen to the hearts of loved ones, listen to the words of chosen family, and not merely chosen by me, but me, having been chosen by them, for reasons I am still unsure about. And ultimately, time to listen to those who came before all of us, who’s words I do not consider myself worth of, or worthy to share, through my own. Words like those that preface this post, without which, I would have likely remained silent, still soaking in my own poison. Words that slapped the self-indulgence right out of me and, I hope to God, make my own words finally worthy of being read.
That quote of James Baldwin, first spoken by him when I was nine years old, brought me from a place of shitty self-indulgence, wherein the only thing I bore witness to was, well… shitty, and self-indulgent… to now, when we understand that a poet, a real poet, is alive to be committed to the welfare of people. Of all the people. And to, I might add, NOT bear witness to their own shitty self-indulgence.
Because there is an entire world before us to bear witness of. Bear witness of its joys and its fears, its triumphs and atrocities, and its storms, for in doing so, we call out the evil, and call in the good.
If this year is like last year, it means I’m ready for it to only snow an inch-and-a-half by the first week of February, then make the season’s only snow angel on the front lawn, wearing just a tee shirt, sweatpants, and bedroom slippers. But for this year, what I mean is, I’m ready for it to blizzard; blizzard so hard that it takes an hour to walk the 5 blocks from my front porch to the Dunkin Donuts on the corner of Middle Country Road, if I feel like going out at all.
Because this year, what I really want, is to sit, in my cushy blue writing chair, laptop open on my legs and glaring in my eyes, to write the world away. Write this world away.
To write another world into existence.
This is a question for all who have read, and maybe written, through this month of November with me. What do YOU want to write, AFTER November ends? Leave your answers in the comments. Let’s make this the beginning of what comes after. When we all can write another world into existence.
Fahrenheit 451, 12 Monkeys, The Flintstones (trust me on that last one because there IS a THEORY). Hell, do you realize that even Star Trek is, in its deepest origin story, a post-apocalyptic fairy tail. I used to love all of these.
Until a couple of days ago, when a meme came across my socials.
A meme that I just spent an hour digging through other memes, hoping to find, without any luck. In fuzzy recollection, the lost meme went something like this,
“What if we’re already in the apocalypse?”
Take all the time you need with that, just like I did. Don’t rush. Let it breathe. Okay, good. Now ask yourself, just like I did, what if we’re living through, right now, in late November of 2023, NOT just humanity’s latest hiccup, but the actual beginning of the end? I know, there isn’t much CHEER in that thought. I mean, consider that, outside of the cozy fringes of what we, here, call Thanksgiving, are we really just giving thanks for one more blindfold to hide our eyes with?
And no, I don’t care if what you’ve read so far makes you stop reading and start blocking.
Remember that Rome had its Pax Romana and its Bread and Circuses (that last phrase was also a Star Trek episode title, by the way), and Rome was also history’s cool kid on the block for at least 500 years. Even started kicking up its heels a good five or six-hundred years prior to that, before it crumbled on the inside, and then burned on the outside.
We here in the land of turkeys on the fourth Thursday of that month which ushers in our annual seasonal depression, have only been the cool kid on history’s block since that time we bloodied the nose of a bully in a war that ended barely 200 years ago. And since that time, we’ve copied everything we learned from that childhood bully, and then even improved the shit out of a lot of his techniques.
We even copied Rome, and its self-proclaimed Peace, plus its offering of Bread and Circuses, when we crafted our own versions through things like Manifest Destiny and the National Football League. And for every culture that got to experience our manifest, it was, for them, the apocalypse.
So why would we ever think that THE apocalypse couldn’t have its very own origin story… in us? One in which those, once bullied to near-extinction, live long enough to become the bullies of someone else’s end times.
So, while naming no names, and only using well-established histories to make a point for my old favorite Sci-Fi trope, realize that Rome, which wasn’t built in a day, rules the world no more. Great Britain, upon who’s empire, as they themselves used to say, “the sun never sets”, is now little more than the world’s doddering great-grandmum, sitting in a corner, drooling over the smells of turkey roasting in the oven. Just a reminder that history repeats itself often, whether or not we who are alive for it, learn from it.
And momentarily rest in the knowledge that, though history is written by the victors, history also teaches that, eventually, the victors are no more. Then, history will be spoken by those who survived, and live on in what those who would have written, might have called the pre-post-apocalypse.
Oh, and I prefer ham to turkey, and would eat mashed potatoes every day of the year.
Throughout the month of November, mostly without wanting to… and this is what happens when you feel committed to something and then, halfway through it, you’re wishing you’d never even heard of the thing… you begin to confront feelings inside yourself that you, till now, had successfully ignored.
You’re forced confront those feelings, because the compression in this one month of time forces you, again, not because you want to. Instead, it’s like you’re living in that familiar moment, where a parent will lock two feuding step brothers in a room together, until the two of them either break their undersized bunk beds, or resolve whatever conflict there has been between them, presumably for the good of the entire family.
And that is hope. Hope that there is resolution in any conflict. But like I said, hope is a comedically unfunny thing. Also, just to clarify, because I’m sure those who got the movie reference want to know, my three favorite Will Ferrell movies are, in order: Land of the Lost, Semi-Pro, and Elf.
You will NOT find the movie Step Brothers named among them.
Unlike the majority of movie-goers, I don’t believe confrontation is funny. I feel movie confrontation, fully and completely, in my trauma-soaked bones. And I despise those feelings associated with confrontation, in all their forms. Not only in our more accustomed violent images in film, but also, in the comedic.
Those who know me well know THIS about me, very well.
So when I say I do not like the feelings I experience during annual November Blog Month, let me explain it this way. Find yourself the most emotionally-triggering movie you have ever seen. Now watch it for 30 straight days. At the same time, listen to all your well-meaning friends tell you that “You’re just wrong about that movie”, or, “Okay, it’s triggering for YOU, but its ONLY 30 times in 30 days.” Or my favorite, “I’m sorry IF YOU feel that way about it, but don’t make the rest of us feel bad just because YOU DO.”
November Blog Month is my Step Brothers.
That one month every year when I must confront my biggest feelings, every day, for 30 straight days, no matter what it does to me. And, by the way, after doing this six times out of the last nine years, and feeling this way about it every time, I’m writing this to tell MYSELF that I own these feelings, as mine, and mine alone, every time I enter this writer’s space.
As of tomorrow, I will have 9 more metaphorical showings of Step Brothers to sit through, as I experience the undiluted dread of that daily confrontation in my soul. I’ll decide what I’m going to do with it, some other time. Until then…
William S. Friday 