A quick writing today, which will be a kind of exercise for me: no re-reading, laboriously thinking over this word, phrase, or what-have-you. Just continuing to type out words here. I think that can be a funny misapprehension about writers: that from the tips of their fingers, rolled out easily from soul-brainpan, words and stories happen. Not so much for me or for other writers I know, listen to, read interviews with. Poetry may be a different ballgame, which is why I’m often intimidated by that art form. Hmmm. Why? Actually, I’m intimidated by poetry in that I often don’t think I understand what I read. Maybe that doesn’t matter.

Anyhoo, so I’ve resisted a few times in even this brief space to look up some words and rewrite some sentences. I started a new paragraph instead because that seems like putting distance between temptation. I usually take about two to three hours to write these entries on Saturdays. U usually have a thought, then investigate what the larger or deeper thing that thought excavates. I’d heard a writer explain her idea of the difference between an essay and/or memoir versus a diary entry really well (basic gist, I’ve made up the rock part): An essay or memoir takes an event or moment and turns over the rock of it, gets muddy, stubs toe, to see what’s underneath, then writes about all that, while a diary entry looks at that rock and describes the pain of the snub, then goes on to something else. Both are perfectly wonderful ways to deal with a rock but one is more interesting to a wider world, I think.

So this exercise in wordage is more a pebble lodged in memory. The picture above, Lucille and Desi through the glass dirtily (need to clean the windows). I’d just come back from a walk, the sun was going down, they were in their favorite window seat that Dennis built them. They don’t altogether understand glass. Why can’t they catch those flying things on the other side of this see-through solid thing? How did you, the person who feeds us and we occasionally let pet us, get out there? Why can’t you clean this thing so we can see better through it. The thing we totally don’t even understand why it exists.

When I’d just left my job at Elektra Records, out the door screaming to get away from the business of music and into (back to?) some universe of creativity, it was fall, my favorite season of all times. NYC’s summer humidity melted into the sidewalks and asphalt with a chill edge shrugging over the city like my favorite sweater. I’d signed up for a writing class at the New School, which was just down the street from my apartment at the time on east12th street. Brilliant. The sense that any-damn-thing was possible. I was reclaiming my life. My teacher, a brilliant writer, Sharon Mesmer. I wrote an essay “Through the Looking Glass” (or something along those lines) about music and a young woman reflected back to herself in a way she doesn’t recognize. I wrote another one—can’t remember the title—about where I spent my teenage years in a subdivision in Southern California and how everything was beige. Those are the only things I remember about those essays and I’m not sure today where they are. Sharon invited me to read them during an event at St. Mark’s Church where she was reading some of her pieces. It was just the two of us. I think I was kind of the opener, like I was the local band to her more well-known touring self (altho she lived in Brooklyn). That night was wild. I mean, St. Mark’s Church was legendary for downtown performers. Patti Smith and so many others performed there. They’d shouted into that air and now I was going to as well. I didn’t shout though. I was gut-punch nervous staring out at the folding chairs. I did see faces I knew. I felt it somewhere that they wanted me to succeed. If not in the artfulness of the story, then at least in getting through the moment without bolting or quivering too badly. I remember the pages being laid on the lecturn so I didn’t have to hold them and shake. And I remember somewhere in the first ten minutes (million hours) something sliding away inside of me that I recognized as nerves. I started to kind of like the feeling of being up there. Understanding a bit better how the musicians I’d stood sidestage with felt to be the ones seen. It was cool, but it wasn’t enough because for sure there had to be something to hold those people out there. I was given twenty minutes. I haven’t done it since and that was more than twenty years ago.

Maybe I will again. The sloughing off of fear though, that is something that as an exercise I can use along with the self-realization that to make the thing sing, there wants to be solitude to bring it from the shu place inside out. First onto a blank page where no one sees it, then some people can see it, then maybe more if it feels good and ready.

Good and ready.