080418 # Dialed up a wet sand sludge water on the vendo, and I was on my way to my favorite table in the watery sun of the warehouse café. REMEMBER! When (not if) your motivation flags, remind yourself liberally that IT DOESN’T HAVE TO AMOUNT TO ANYTHING in particular. Inspiration, serendipity: these are awesome, like a big shimmering trout, but they are by NO MEANS REQUIRED! You can literally sit and literally type literally the most literally banal phrases and sentences, and get absolutely not ONE frisson of recognition or astonishment, let alone a mild twinge of surprise, and STILL HAVE DONE THE JOB. It’s just rocks, after all. It’s just a wall, jutting out into the surf, gathering slime and children’s echoing memories. Sometimes, in fact, inspiration and motivation can work against you as easily as they can hypnotize you into thinking you’re “doing” something. Part of the exercise is to be comfortable with “doing” very little—remember, a very large part of this whole process is just learning how to commandeer your own time and attention. THOSE are the precious secret mussels, squirming in the salty light. NOT ideas or messages or (god forbid) products. This guy over here is talking either to himself or to the microwave or to his own futile disillusionment. THe war never completely stopped or went away after Isherwood’s generation was done coming to terms with it. It just dissipated. It seeped into the asbestos of a million school ceilings. It wafted into the ventilation shafts of innumerable locker rooms and basement offices. It sprinkled itself in smithereens over the acorn fields of everybody’s aunt’s cousin’s backyard. It jiggered itself a spoonful at a time into the ratchety throats of guys in wheelchairs doing impatient mini donuts in front of the microwave, fully focused on the microwave’s unsatisfactory performance. “Does this thing even work?” he mutters, audibly enough for EVERYONE (aka me) to hear clearly, although I dearly hope he’s not expecting an answer, least of all from the fucking microwave itself, because he can. He CAN ask that because there’s no actual bombs going off right here. This building isn’t crumbling into rubble, and common, everyday boots aren’t stomping over the wreckage, deciding who will live and who will haunt the empty spaces behind barbed wire. His time and attention is fully absorbed by that microwave, by his own conversation with it, and that’s fine, but in the fibrillating space between him and me lies the spoor of the war that never went away. We are all rotting flesh, after all, negotiating with buttons, looking sideways at each other. Down below the mezzanine, a nice long plump girl swims laps. The jubilation of her flesh paddles otterlike up and down, up and down, and my gaze floats in and out, in and out. The guy is still muttering at the microwave. “This whole thing sucks. Twenty seconds doesn’t work.” DOES HE THINK ANYONE CARES? Stop. Wait. Stop. I’m waiting for her to swim back up here again. Sexuality is complicated. For twenty to thirty years now I’ve been in my own little microwave conversation. Mine has to do with what to “call” myself. I’m not gay, I’m not straight. “Bisexual” just seems so clinical, weak, and falsely dichotomous. Why do I have to call myself anything? I guess because I not-so-secretly want to meet someone, and I have this idea that you need a category to sit in when you stick yourself on that carousel and go out and around. If I’m not sitting in the right section, the right person won’t be able to find me, right? Or is it something else. DO I just want credit for belonging to an exotic phylum. I want to be something other than the deeply flawed individual specimen that I am; if I can define specifically enough what sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-category I am, eventually I’ll get to the point where I’m the only living example of it, and so necessarily I’ll be the perfect specimen! Exploded metaphors; slippery divagations; the wild compass needle looking for north in space. I am compassionate with my neocortex. I know it’s just trying to figure something out and is uncomfortable with simple silence. This discomfort does in fact sometimes produce a hard little pearl; scrunched with mischief like a little teasing nipple. Keep it simple: I’m just lonely, and different things seem to trip my trigger at different times. Sometimes it’s men, sometimes it’s women, often it’s just a situation that has elements of what I seem to conceive as both. I have a feeling I’m not that unique. We just don’t have a good, fluid vocabulary for this stuff yet. So I guess you could say that’s one of the things I’d like to work on contributing to in my “writing,” if that’s at all possible. And it is: if I learn to share. The way little kids bob in the shallow water, shoulders tight and high, as if willing the rest of their body not to sink in an untrusted element. Little kids bobbing in the shallow, shoulders high and tight, half ballet half tap, smiles sailing along, bellies submarine, fingertips outstretched. Lonely, sensual, sensuous, muscles feeling nicely used, having got my real work done so maybe I can inch closer to my paycheck work. Feeling the old hunger; I’m still alive. I can handle old and even older (up to a point I suppose—but until you’re in it, that point’s always a horizon away). I can pretty much handle being anything except pale, saggy, and flabby as a drooling fish belly. The swimming girl’s pretty face, broad, sunshiny, surfaces again at the deep end. She’s one end of a wet hypotenuse of a triangle made of me, her, and the dry old business desk in the lobby under the mezzanine. Is there a way to not have to use so many prepositional phrases? That’s a fun programming challenge. Lib & Cel are still doing secret chipmunk games in the shallow, bobbing up and ducking under together, face to face; anything could be communicated in those giggling dips, and no lifeguard would ever know. Right under our mundane noses, the future is built; the never ending war begins to meet its demise. My squirrels, my girls, my elves, my powerful angels. You redeem me.