Sentence To Sentence

I'd to bed late gone and from bed early risen, all this tiredness and the hollowness at the back of my knees temporarily disabused by this idea of myself as a writer, producer of content. I'd already one submission in for this particular contest ("wacked out," a friend said of it), but I'd this other idea riding the other day, and another submission I'd hoped to maybe draw out of it; from the well of all this riding I'd hoped to pull the story arc to life. So I wrote - late into the night and early through the morning. But this, I'm learning is yet another problem with procrastination: the worlds of words cannot quite so easily be forced from the dark corners in which they hide; the stories buried beneath these ancient seas, fossilized by the living that keeps on right above them, cannot be quite so easily unearthed. And so it was with this story, that I'd bits and pieces of the skeleton unearthed, without much of an idea how they fit together or what prehistoric beast it was I was assembling. So, on account of all the bones still buried somewhere in this restless mind, I admitted my defeat and turned it aside.

Words, though. They're both wholly perfect and wholly flawed, and I find myself once again digging through haystacks to grasp at straws that may or may not allow me air. I remember an exercise we did in a Wilderness First Aid class I took once, an attempt at mimicking asthma at altitude; each of us were handed a straw which we held to our lips, then were asked to run. Only through the straw could we breathe, and at seven-thousand feet and counting, this was no small feat. Most lasted no more than a few steps; I ran until my world grew fuzzy at the edges and then those edges began closing in, and I could have stopped running, but I couldn't. So the edges closed in and I ran and then there was just darkness and then I was crumpled on the ground. I hadn't dropped the straw, but my body'd forced me to stop running. Sometimes, writing, it feels like this is exactly what I'm trying to do with words.

I wonder how words might make us crumple and fade and forget everything else, but then I remember some of these email dialogues from lives past. And I've this long email dialogue from the time present I suppose I'll likely share with you when I'm next in your city, once our city; this is the nature of brothers, this is the nature of best friends, that I've half a mind that won't think without your respective helps.

But, dialogues. There is great value, I realize, in the comfort of any sort of dialogue that comes unbidden and easily, that can be right without much effort. There is even greater value, perhaps, in the dialogue that forces us to dig for the right words and phrases and ideas, knowing that even though we're closer than we were, the words are still all wrong and as likely will be at least in some part misunderstood. But so it is: words are perfect perhaps precisely because of their fallibility. Besides, I've found that often enough it's the effort that counts for at least as much as the product, at least in these sorts of exchanges.

Backtracking: I'm tired and I'm worn and I'm drained and I'm worn down. You see, you're just like everyone / When the shit falls all you want to do is run away / And hide all by yourself. The dissonance between rational and emotional is playing a particular set of songs (not just this one, but...) - and it's altogether too fitting that I've been listening to this Pandora station ("You Became The Knife"), this particular brand of folksy acoustic indie emo. It's not so much that I'm stuck, I don't think, as that I'm struggling with the motivation to swim, and questioning which direction. So I'm still in Missoula, for at least another hour or two, rather than on the road. And I was half-heartedly working on this story that I now know I won't finish in time for today's submission deadline (not enough bones have I found yet, alas), and I'm half-heartedly writing emails where I know the phrasing's off by at least half an octave, and in the back I've Tiny Desk Concerts playing. There's performers sure (Benjy Ferree and Tallest Man On Earth come to mind), but more so it's the intimacy of the setting that strikes me full in the face. Nakedness, the music stripped down so as to even more vulnerable than words. Rodrigo y Gabriella to wake up to the world, The Swell Season to embrace the beauty inherent in every ugly truth. Music is a communion; so too should be words.

In words we lay ourselves bare, opened up at the sternum, cracked ribs and messily struggling lungs gasping for air. If the sentence is right, maybe we'll catch that breath, maybe that straw will be enough. And if not? Well. I'd rather not think about 'if not.'

I haven't told you the story here, I realize, nor any of the stories quite. But how often do we really tell each other the story? Such isn't our way with words. Rather, we've a history of opaque narratives that tell the translucent truths of who we are in that moment, in that thin slice of time, a Polaroid soul. Stealing and perverting words from an email sent the other day: in this way we write, we tell not plot, but place; offer not the scene, but the sensations; give not the time, but offer instead our thoughts. Verbatim from the same email: "Writing is a thing that forces us to be alone with ourselves and learn who we really are... words are the distillery of our [self]."

And I wake this morning thinking about how things die and decompose and break down, and in doing so, fuel the growth of something new. How destruction begets creation. And I think I'd like to someday fuel a fine whiskey, my bones in that smokey peat of a damn fine scotch. Maybe my words will yet serve as a still; I'm bootlegged and a little rotten yet now, but I've hope of someday being better and more. From dust to dust, and sentence to sentence.