When I breath in simple oxygen it is like nitrous filling my nasal cavities with sugar.
I lay awake at 5 am trying to convince myself that healthy people sleep more than this.
I inhale the nitrous sugar and would rather be upright...writing.
My head is loud, but not with worthy or actual obsessions. Someone left the radio on and they are scanning the channels, just skipping from commercial...pop-song...talk show interview. I am not attached to any of these stations, but I cannot turn it off.
Only two play real music. The running channel and the writing channel.
Now that I am a bit older, I prefer the writing channel. My knees are grateful.
“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.”
Allen Ginsberg
The cats carry me down the hall on their tide of mini-meows for food.
I press the coffee button on my trusty, maroon coffee pot. The one I got for Christmas the same year I got the Crock Pot which sits in it's groove in the cupboard. Untouched and misunderstood.
I pull my hair into a cascade ponytail at the top of my head and wonder when I will wash it again.
Probably after I work-out today...or tomorrow.
It is the color of autumn sun. That's what Micah from high school used to call it. We would go out to my '72 Impala across the street from Viewmont high school and make out. He wasn't a very good kisser, but he understood the Beat poets, and there was a knowing in his eyes. Now he has a thick beard and still works at a brewery downtown even though he is 37. He probably still understands those Beat poets too.
He was always headin' off to Ketchum Idaho which is where Hemingway died, and I'm reading a book about his wife. Hemingway's wife, whom he calls Hash, and how she fell in love with an alcoholic, which is what my friend is doing right now. I can see how it happens. It is fascinating to watch from this far removed seat. I used to be the star of this movie and now I am 7 rows back in the dark wearing soft sweat pants and bare feet. Before they become pathetic, alcoholics themselves are intoxicating. They hurl themselves at the night trying to sucking up every drop of inspiration between the twilight and the dawn. To dance with them can make you forget. You can forget there was ever anything worth preserving...not a marriage, or a mortgage, or a car, or a job, or the laundry folded and put away in drawers. They pull metaphors from the sky and splay them with words like lace over you, while dancing the finest swing step you've ever seen. They don't miss a beat and their eyes, the way they invite you to join them like fish hooks for your soul.
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge...
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks...
...who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
...with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years."
Allen Ginsberg ~Howl
But in the morning they turn grey. They hide from the sun, from themselves and when they go dark they leave a vacuum. Not the normal space of leaving, but a black hole that sucks in and takes more than its' share of light.
I am one who did not die. One morning I woke up and could find nowhere to run, and no strength for chasing angels. My body was heavy and real, made of bones and flesh and eyes tired.
I laid down in the dirt to cry, and the angels I had been chasing laid down and cried with me.
Now I tend to my antique store. Usually I reside peacefully with the artifacts in my care. I respect them. I respect what they represent which is my own humanness. I cannot outrun it or create any great art piece that will not reveal this truth. No one can. Not even my teenage idols, not Jack Kerouac or Tom Robbins or Ani DiFranco, or Bukowski, or Gary Snyder (Who I met at the library once and he was a small man with a wide smile. He didn't die either.) or Ayn Rand or J.D. Salinger...none of them.
Sometimes I still miss the madness though. And I wonder: is one life better than the other? Really?
Either way we all die. So do I die from the dangerous tight-rope that is drinking and hitch-hiking and writing and failing and tasting everything? Or do I die safely tucked into my insurance plan, my family, my college degree and my antiques?
At the bottom of my question I find the truth:
I cannot answer that for anyone else.
I can only know my own life.
By the light of the morning which greets me at my window...
I know that my best writing and living and loving is happening now.
It did not happen when I was chasing idols and glittering night fish.
It happens quietly in my sweatpants and coffee sunrise.
I do not fault these artists, these alcoholics for their wild rides. I am grateful for theirs and for mine.
I don't need to quantify one as better or more worthy than another. If I ever think this to be necessary, it is because I have forgotten the angels in the dirt.
Were it not for the ride, I would not have fallen there, and the would never have come to me.
My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.
— Jack Kerouac
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| The Beats shoot some breeze ... (left to right) painter and musician Larry Rivers, Jack Kerouac, poet Gregory Corso (back of head to camera), musician David Amram, and Allen Ginsburg. Photograph: John Cohen/Getty Images |
"When you are on the dancefloor, there is nothing to do but dance." Umberto Eco.
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