Coffee, Wreckage, Old Friends, Stars

April 30, 2000

I didn't write last night because I got home late, so now on this thus-far uneventful Sunday morning, I'll catch up...

I don't know how people stand me when I haven't been writing. I mean, I'm not an Asimov or a Stephen King-- I don't have to be writing to be at ease. But when I haven't been writing for a while, this low-level anxiety starts to build, I get snippish and short-tempered and annoyed at myself, and the urge to find a Waffle House at 4 a.m. and write bitter poetry asserts itself almost uncontrollably. The past week and a half or so have been eaten up with this and that, and I've had almost no time to write. So yesterday I went to the coffee shop (with headphones and some trusty mixed-tapes to make me appear unapproachable and uninterested in conversation), my clipboard, and the notes on my novel.

I wrote, guys. And it was good. I crashed a flying tower into a glass building in the middle of a lake of bubbling tar. I discussed the inherently blasphemous nature of mispronouncing the first Word. The dangers of tetanus were addressed. Knives, staffs, and broken hands came into play. Oh, man. Writing is the best drug there is (well-- among the ones I've tried). I'm in a much better mood, now.

At the coffee shop-cum-book store (my only quibble with Mosaic Books is their almost total dearth of sf. There's some Phil Dick and Anne Rice (yech) and the "classic" sf that gets to be labeled as plain-old fiction, but that's it. They have good poetry and history and biography and religion and such, though) I bought The Art of Drowning by Billy Collins, who's very good. Buying that book made me think of the other poetry I own, and I find it interesting that Collins is a straight white male non-buddhist not-noticeably-environmentalist with no discernible political agenda-- most of the poets I read write largely about being gay, or being women, or being Buddhist, or Jewish, or about the destruction of nature, or social policies... all of which are important, fascinating things about which to write (and the fact that I read those poets should stand as testament to the fact that I'm interested in the subjects), but it's nice to read wonderful poetry by a guy who writes about romance and traveling and smoking cigarettes and hanging out in coffee shops and growing up and growing old... because I'm sort of like that in my own poetry, and I've always had this nagging fear that I wasn't writing anything significant and that, worse yet, I didn't have anything significant to write about.

I hope that made sense.

I found out yesterday that my friend Katherine is in town, and my roommate D. and I went searching for a party last night where she'd promised to be in attendance. After a brief foray across the Tennessee state line and lots of turning around, we located the place, and hung out a bit. Katherine is one of those people who just bubbles with fun-- and she's a damn fine writer, too. I'll hopefully have lunch with her today. We'll see. She was probably up until six or seven a.m., though, and she has to go back east today (she teaches at an "alternative" school-- she says she's teaching kids who are a lot like she used to be, which is poetic justice), so I may not hear from her. Seeing her got me thinking about old friends drifted away, about great experiences I've had... such thoughts might have made me melancholy, and they did a little, at first, but on the way home I got to thinking about all the great experiences that are (hopefully) ahead of me, and all the wonderful memories I have, things that still make me smile and feel warm when I'm alone in the dark.

Once I got home I lay on the hood of my car and looked into the clear night sky, something I haven't done in a long time, and remembered getting up before dawn one August morning and going out to the parkway with my then-girlfriend Leigh so we could watch the meteors shower out of the Laides. I thought of Anna Medinger, from my old writing group, who I haven't spoken to in years. I read some poetry for the group once, and Anna said "Those poems sound like 'These are the best days of my life,' but you know it's only going to get better."

Thanks, Anna. I remember, now. I know.