8.4.08

tractor trailor

I bought a long fountain pen yesterday and some essays by TS Eliot on poetry and poets and a panini and today I think the wind's strong enough to turn my umbrella inside out and soak me but good and I'm lately haunted by the words of that girl I worked with in the bakery years ago who authoritatively told me how Japanese was impossible to learn after you reached adulthood and I wish I had a full single day to sit down and write because these wind up/wind down hours squeezed in on the sides of work aren't enough for me to get into whatever zone it is that lets me hammer out mediocre stories and I just realized yesterday that if you think you might be neurotic then you are neurotic and if you think you're left-brained then you probably are and both of those things make writing poetry an exercise in futility and I'm starting to see why I got the impression that some of my writing professors thought that if you didn't have natural talent you'd never make it as a writer and my natural inclination is to say that's crazy, that you can do anything if you work for it, but then that's the American in me and where I ain't at present is there and where I am is a place where the nails that stand out get hammered down--as the elementary school saying goes--and I'm a person who teaches English and I'm a person who must needs do it by the book and I'm a person who has read a thing or two about education and cognition and neurosis and the arrant plague of information that has avalanched the collective unconscious while I was sleeping and now there's thick powdery white noise for miles at every exit and I'm stuck here in my head waiting for that year-long vacation after I retire and before I die to carve a spade from a dream and dig myself out before the apathy and contentedness build up and leaves me convinced that it'd take more energy to break out in the first place than I'd reap at last.

I think I want to take up an art. A physical one. I'm thinking calligraphy, because I figure if I want to be a writer I may as damn well learn how to write.

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