Rave on – Type on

From “Timed Practice Writings”

These are Red Sox truths –

Well, I’ll get to the Sox as I embark here on another 17:45 minutes of screed under the auspices of “Timed Writing”, an exercise I have created for myself with the phone clock rolling back from just under eighteen, some days with a topic in mind, a thought, a pondering, a need to say something cool about something not so cool, and other days like this one, now that I’ve put the Red Sox on delay, with narry an idea in my head, the goal being to sit in this very place on the cheap chair I bought at a church basement sale soon after arrival in Portland 10 years ago and at this keyboard I am now banging – as we used to say in AA back in the day, to suit up and show up (as it were) and act as if. Act as if there is something I want to write when in fact it’s the action of writing what’s the thing, the repetition, the hopefully developing muscle memory, the goal to come here every day for this 17:45 (minimum) and do this, type on – yeah, that’s the way to say it – Type On!!! – and hopefully chuck off internal editings in situ and simply be my old sixties self and let it all hang out. It’s not the meat, as Maria would say, it’s the motion. (Another 60’s reference for the misfortunate who just don’t know – don’t you know.) If the joy is in the journey, these aching wrists and two fingertips, as in yowser with the old two-finger peck-a-thon, which by the way is the way I’ve been typing my whole life including nearly three years of high school sports reporting on both coasts, all the way from field hockey to water polo, even a Dana Hills girls cross country team banquet where they played what they said was their theme song, that’d be Bruce’s “Tramps Like Us (Baby We Were Born to Run) –

which all of this or any of it gets back to the point that it is my great hope to become unstuck as a writer, in this particular thought as a writer of fiction, crank up the dull brain cells with a bit of ECT – electrode therapy and try to get some storytelling and plot developing going, and therefore it says here that this act, this right here very here act of coming to the church chair and glue-ing down my old butt and letting these two first digits peck and punch and bang and rage against the keys so’s that by the very doing I may let go and let it hang out and be present on the day when something shows up. Or someone, some character who looks up at me from the monitor with a “Yo, dickhead, follow me cause I’m the pied piper and I’ll show you where it’s at.” This is the goal, this is the plan, this is the hope, as Bruce said elsewhere – “Man the dope is that there’s still hope.” –

trust me he did back on one of the first three albums, by far and away his best work my two fingers say, which raises the point of the chicken and egg saga, as in while I’m typing non-stop and doing my very best – and I say here honestly not too bad at all – with NO self-editing, which comes first? Is there a thought in my head that demands release or do these two fingers go where they go cause they know what’s next and voila my thought follows along, tries to catch up, wants to lay claim to the letters running across the Word doc on the old Westinghouse monitor, yeah, like, over here, I thought that shit up. Which, thinking about it, should I type something howlingly offensive to the peanut gallery I can therefore say, hey, it wasn’t me, I didn’t write that shit, blame it on yin and yang over there, I just followed along, it was like a pied piper thing, listen to the music and run run run, lemming-like, it ain’t me babe. So yeah, all of which may mean very little in the old “scheme of things” when you get down to it, what with global warming and kids in cages and episodes of “Line of Duty” waiting to be streamed for fun and pleasure and even possibly further brain cell activity – maybe a smidge like lighting the old Christmas tree. Which is about it.