092918 go. go. go-go, pa-TET doom. Anyway. It is time for my mid-day sesh, and I have no clue what to say. That is a good thing. That is in fact the whole god damned point. Let’s take a little inventory, shall we? 1. I’m sitting here, in my “room” abutting the kitchen 2. I have my headphones on and a goofy guy who acts all suave is tapping on mason jars half-full of liquid 3. I’m leaning back in my bouncy office chair, the big computer to my left (black screened, inert), the window and the bed behind me (bright, inert), my feet up on my file cabinet *cum* shelf 4. I can faintly see the outline of my headphoned head in the screen of this Macbook Pro 5. I look and feel like a pilot of the chill airwaves 6. Relaxed, at home, in the falling temperatures that signify hard, long, cold, lonely, disturbed times ahead 7. but before those times come the burning times, the exploding times, the vivaceous times out on sidewalks with open fire pits and loud laughter and quiet corners 8. a squirrel got scared earlier today when i walked past his porch 9. he almost dropped his nut 10. instead he scampered, making loud wooden noises, i don’t know if he even knew where he was going, but he looked at me kind of wall-eyed and eventually i was gone and he (i can only assume) got on with his life I still don’t know what to say. Remember, though, that that’s OK. That is the point. It’s like having stacks and stacks of cases of envelopes and your job this afternoon is to stack them up somewhere else. Or open them up and stack the individual boxes somewhere. You don’t have to have an epiphany about anything. You don’t have to have scintillating conversation. You don’t have to understand something fundamental about geometry, or about the manufacturing processes that result in all those perfect little triangles overlapping with perfect rectangles and all shuffled into place, standing neatly on edge in the box, perfect, flawless. full of air and hope and life You don’t have to think anything at all. You don’t have to wear an apron and look like a working man. You don’t have to not think about anything. You don’t have to have packed a lunch. You don’t have to be anything or do anything or be anyone or do anyone. All you have to do is stack those boxes of envelopes over there, yeah? Like I told you, and then it’ll be time to either go home or do some other job or go to lunch or whatever it is that it is time for then. It really is that simple. That’s what I love about this. I feel like i won the fucking lottery, having discovered that this is all there is to it. It’s like literally. Like literally. Like literally if just walking down the sidewalk was all it took to get to the end of the sidewalk. Everything else that happens along the way—the squirrels, the balconies, the white lace curtains caressing the breeze, the ancient slab of wood that is the door of that old pub, the one that’s been here since before the gentrification, the fan in the window at ankle level, blowing out a big billowing invisible cloud of stale ass bar smell: broken cigarettes, dirty beer, words exhaled that can’t ever be taken back, interrupted lives, lives interrupted by the need to be here right now, on this sidewalk outside this bar, you don’t even have to go in, you just have to be in the zone, in the vibrating zone of what’s left of what makes up the mood of a city that you love and keep coming back to and that makes you breathe slower and deeper and better every time you walk here. And we haven’t even gotten to the south side yet. What if drawing pictures on typewriter paper (remember when it was called that) with your crayons or your colored pencils or your ball point pen were all it took to be an artist? What if walking were all it took to go on a journey? What if talking to someone were all it took to have a story? What if asking questions was the key to the garden? What if just having the will power to do the easiest thing in the world were all it took to be an artist? It is. It is because I said so, and because Dorothea said so, and because if I explained it this way, or maybe a little bit more precisely than this but with drums and elbows gesturing and a bit of passion, friendly passion with coffee or a beer in a hardwood room with the ancient slab of a door hanging open to the comely anonymity of a late Saturday morning, other people would say so too. People are waiting for you. People are waiting for a bus. That’s enough to start with. Go. The hands on the jeans. The magazine open to the fall breeze, pages turning at the touch of some invisible hand. The cloudy plexiglass of the bus station shelter. The hard burnished aluminum of the bench under there. The giant face of the advertisement on one wall. People walking past. People in search of pizza or beer or coffee or sex or vindication. People going to the cafe or the dojo or their lawyer’s office or a vintage clothing store where they traded in their youth a long ass time ago and are going to stop in, if they can get up the nerve, to see if it’s still in there, and if so then how much does it cost. Go with them. Pick one of them, any one of them, and follow them. Go have a story. Your fingers and your silly little face will be ready, because you sat here and did this. I’m not dead yet and I’m pretty glad about that.