Putting My Shoulder to the Wheel

“Fill up the space that I don’t need, I feel most complete when we’re asleep.” – TFB

I have been trying to learn more about myself and why I feel sudden urges to write things down lately. Narrowing it down proves to be harder than the actual task of typing or penning thoughts into a notebook. Some say the writer never realizes their own muses until it is too late, and I am beginning to find that accurate.

I remember being forced to pick a subject, find a reasonable amount of solid sources, and achieve a page requirement for school assignments and being confused on whether or not that would really develop my skills. Now that I am choosing to not invest in an expensive education, I seem to look towards my words instead of my technique. Maybe my writing flows better because I’m not thinking as hard. Or maybe it’s all an illusion and this all reads like a commercial for the newest ADD medication. Who’s to say.

Either way, I’m leaning towards this overly opinionated method instead of the latter for comfort purposes. Come with me on this journey, buddies.

I talk about this blog only inside of itself like some sort of inception, it is eating its self alive letter by letter, word by word. The notes in the music playing from my speakers running together too fast for me to remember where it started, creating one long absence of noise in my head making it throb for attention. No matter how much tea I drink, my throat stays soar. No matter how much reading I do, the books keep duplicating too fast to learn, closing in on me. The holidays are either happening or already over and we are in January. Gotta spend time with my folks, gotta spend money on their gifts, gotta visit my friends, gotta write, gotta sing, gotta play guitar, gotta be going. I better get going, must not waste time dillydallying. Been listening to songs about the mundane, realizing slowly that you don’t have to cloud your mind to write something beautiful. Just look around a little bit and you will find it even if you haven’t been looking. It is hiding in the clouds, in the trees, in the freshly driven snow. In the friday crowds, in the sunday streets, maybe even in the cracks you already cleaned, falling down the slope that has always been behind your back right between your spine and the chord that connects you to the ground. In the dead flowers hung on your apartment walls from the September market and the tacks that hold them there. In the same bus you take downtown to catch a drink with twenty strangers, having only loneliness in common. “One more drink, my heart sinks.”

In the linens you took off of your bed that collect too much heat and in the blanket that replaced them. In the handmade pillowcase that has followed you to different homes in different cities in different states, holding your head away from the unfamiliar bed frames. Finding sleep only in the little dreaming the back of your eyelids project to your tired brain, it stays at surface level until your boat floats past, missing the same nets your lay out the night before. It slips away toward the unlikely, the unruly critters running the machinery in your left brain so the right can develop the colors filling the boring lines already imagined. In that last memory from your past life and in the way if feels so familiar. It feels yours and you miss it when it’s gone.

In the silence between songs, between episodes, between words in run-on sentences and endless conversation. Personifying your plants to make them more than just silent company when you are alone keeping warm while keeping the heat off. Soaking through the raincoat, melting toward the frozen pavement and slipping in your own guts. In the crooked picture frames you tilt back into place revealing a layer of dust that has lived there for too long. In the creak in the floorboards heard once a month as you pay the rent, your millennial heart taking a beating missing imaginary money that never existed outside of your phone screen, but you worked damn hard just like everyone else to miss the money in your head. It is in the people you haven’t met yet, taking shelter in thoughts they have yet to develop. In the brains of the children growing up in poverty stricken communities who are pushed towards anything but artistic pathways, some sort of path always traveled and wearing away from traffic. It is there and it misses you just as much as you don’t miss it.

AlbumOfTheMonth:

Birdie by Slaughter Beach, Dog.

FavoriteSongFromSaidAlbum:

Gold and Green

Stay Radical

Paige Alys