I Should Be Writing

This morning, one of our graduate students complimented my use of a Kerouac quote in my email signature and asked if I had seen the exhibit on Beat Poets at one of the libraries on campus. I said I hadn’t but wanted to go. He said it was pretty good, so I decided on my lunch break that I’d head on over and check it out.

It’s going to take several trips over there for me to ingest it all. It’s not a huge exhibit but there’s a lot in it that I feel a connection with, and get this: City Lights has its own panel. All of the photos are old but just seeing them took me back, especially when the panel described how the bookstore has expanded several times but has never moved from its location in North Beach. I, of course, became a bit melancholy and homesick. I miss sleeping in the park and smelling the ocean and hearing the blare of car horns.

When I began reading Kerouac’s journals last year, I found myself overwhelmed by this strange ache. It burns a little, prickles in my bones, and makes me very, very exhausted. After a few minutes in the exhibit, I began to feel it, so I moved through the cases pretty quickly. Someday soon I will go back when I’m not on a tight schedule and spend all of the time I want looking at the manuscripts and books and journals.

How did it make me feel? Void. Much like I am not yet living. I’m jealous of the passion they exhibited, jealous of the beauty that poured from their fingers. Maybe I’ll find it? I’m not sure. It hurts to be so dependent on my day job for security. I wonder if I took two months off to rest if it would help with the exhaustion so I could write again.

I just don’t know. I do know, however, that I would give just about anything to be in North Beach right. now.

I need my words to matter again.

Part 1

EEL told me that I should leave the dates off if I want to be truly Faulknerian. Also, I should probably start in one place in time and then skip to three others simultaneously. It might rip a hole in the space time continuum, so hold onto your pants.

The first time I wrote something and thought, “This is what I do,” the something was a very short poem about how I was going to kill everyone. I wasn’t actually planning to kill anyone – maim, perhaps, but never kill – but it took my scary explosive anger down a notch and it wasn’t long before I filled every available space in different notebooks with my rantings and ravings. They were about? How I was going to kill everyone. And/or myself.

Sometimes I talked about true love and men who rode into my life and swept me off my feet like some knight in DAZZLING armor.

Usually I was just very angry.

I became quite proficient at typing because of my mind, which works at a million parts per millisecond. My fingers had to be dexterous to keep up. It is my preferred method of writing because when my right hand attempts to keep up with my brain, my penmanship becomes illegible.

I didn’t say, “I’m going to be a Writer” because A Writer was not something you became. It was something you were. You can teach skill but you cannot teach talent. That’s not to say I am exploding with talent. I always thought I would be Something Else and A Writer on the side. That is my life now, where Something Else is A Secretary. And I don’t do much writing on the side, sadly.

Hence the name of this blog.

I should be writing.