Though lovers be lost love shall not…
–Dylan Thomas
When I say “romantic,” I mean a sensibility that sees everything, and has to express everything, and still doesn’t know what the fuck it is, it hurts that bad. It just madly tries to speak whatever it feels, and that can mean vast things. That sort of mentality can turn a sun-kissed orange into a flaming meteorite, and make it sound like that in a song.
–Jeff Buckley
All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.
–Andre Breton
Working for a living is the worst. Not only are you surrendering your lifetime for money, you’re participating in your own oppression, and contributing to the oppression of those beneath you. We all need a foil, bet, and the wealthy aren’t the only people who need someone to look down on to feel better about themselves. That’s capitalism, Comrade, and further proof white guilt is a shallow gesture and ego stroke that has nothing to do with black and brown people. Some of us rise up no matter who we are and conquer our own worlds behind a typewriter after driving a bus all day. These are the exception, the Artist and the Writer, and, as far as writing is concerned–the only thing worse than working for a living is starting to write. Beginning. I don’t know why starting is so hard or why it stops so many of us from writing at all. It could be a mistrust of the slipshod world, that once we open the inner chamber, the flowing channels of wisdom that are ours for the taking when we write will be interrupted and get rushed by the filth and the fury. There’s a certain amount of safety needed to write–and quiet, if not peace.
“I did over 12,000 miles this summer, and visited 6 countries, but I couldn’t write at all.”
A good Reader writes from “an attic in Smithville”, adding:
“My traveling partner had no boundaries and zero respect for mine. He possessed a horrible combination of aggression and southern hospitality. He was a bully, but not an overt one. And he never shut the fuck up. On commuter trains, busses, hotel rooms, lobbies, waiting rooms and especially in the tight quarters of a prepper farm on the foothills of the Ural Mountains. Between Kazakhstan and the Barents Sea, he insinuated me to death! He gaslighted me constantly. He loved to tell me how he was looking out for me while he hinted and suggested the bullshit out of every waking moment.”
“Couldn’t you find any time to be alone?,” I asked.
“No. His presence was so toxic I couldn’t write even when I was on my own. I was too shook and his presence loomed. He assumed I was beholden to him, that I owed him somehow.”
“I can relate”, I told him, and the truth is—what kept him from writing on another continent, and all the mindfuckery and empathy-exhaustion of bad travel he described, probably feels no different than the dread of starting writing I’ve experienced on my days off from the temp job. Once I get rolling no prob, but starting, or thinking about starting? It takes up more bandwidth than actually committing to the thing. A lot of times I got so much trouble on my mind and I forget that writing is the way out, Brothers&Sisters. The solution is locked in the arms of the problem. You’ve got to unfurl, unkink and let wisdom speak and speak through you.
No more, Butchie, no more of this.
–Phil Leotardo
So much for the trouble with writing and bad travel partners. I could tell you some stories, good Reader–make your asshairs stand up. I’m due back in New Orleans, to pay a $600 ticket, but maybe I should run some voodoo down. Either that or never travel without expenses paid. The world is on fire anyway. We got inside of twenty-two years sustainable left and I’m quitting Creative Nonfiction. It’s a bummer–the fact I have to drudge up and shake out my small shames and great fears every week, if I want to keep writing and consider myself a writer. I’m not speaking to how this blog speaks to you, or that it connects us in catastrophe and dispels the isolation of being a seer in the land of the blind. It worked and for the last 8 years it’s been a boon, a great way to pass the time and the luckiest goddamn thing. But too a bane, ain’t it though. I’m switching formats and I’m driving to New Orleans. I’ll be working in the Personal Journalism business now and I know a place in Mid City where I can get a bag of gris-gris, solve my buddy’s problem and mine. Welcome to the darker half. It’s time to bury the dead.
Please tune in to Into The Void Magazine this Sunday for Part 9 of The Coarse Grind, Jim Trainer’s monthly column on writing and the creative life.
Going for the Throat 