Thought-Drive

The art-house project is back on. Proudly, I have enlisted the help of someone far more artistically talented than I to help execute what I have in mind to do. The effort necessitated me to creak open the folder on a dusty flash drive and peer inside at all of my poetry. I explained the experience to a friend as if I was reading through a stranger's work. I found the fellow talented, but most disconcerting was that I couldn't remember when I wrote the things. Like an delirious grandparent, once I stared into the faces of my progeny, touched their ears, I remembered writing them, remembered their base elements, but that was all. And events recently have inspired me to try and track down one of those decedents. Unfortunately, a mentor of mine told me once that professional writers burn their juvenalia. Don't ask me how people separate one thing from another (In a conversation I had once with a poet friend, he revealed to me some wisdom that he had gleaned: a mark of a poe...

I wonder if maybe there might be something wrong with me, shooting out of the cloudy sky like a carefully constructed rocket, and smiling down on the dreary landscape that was yesterday's Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson. At least, dreary in comparison to the bright and sunny midday, warm, with only a slight chance of clouds, that was yesterday's Puerto Rico. Maybe I was just glad to be home, to see my own bed, to be able to check my email (formerly I thought being able to check my email on my phone was a good thing, but being unable to efficiently answer any of those emails, or quickly jump to the links they pointed to made it sort of like torture). All I know is that I don't know. Much like the wedding. I wonder: if one does a competent, even vaguely memorable job, is that enough to make the day special? The feelings are there, like a driven locomotive, all a body has to do is not get in the way. Whatever hiccups there were, or shortcomings I feel that I had, the bride and gr...

It seems a bit pessimistic to type this as if it will be my last correspondence with the living, web world. Yet planes do crash. And people do talk about giving their loved ones roses "while they're still alive to enjoy them." But no one talks about the dead person. Should not we also say the things we intend to say while we're still alive to say them? Or maybe that's why I write, to speak from the grave, demand, question, contemplate from an aether of sorts. or a prison much like death. Leading up to this sojourn over the happy sea, I have accomplished several of my goals. That sterling prose has been mailed (burnished, more like). I still await rejection letters from a variety of places, along with confirmation of publication from a couple others (that is, evidence of their having followed through). An alum even got back to me about querying agents. I had a burger last night under a conversation with an actor friend of mine about how exactly one, in his profes...

I have a lot of ideas floating around in my head these days. Feels like around this time last year I was asked to preside over a wedding for a friend. I took a week to think about it, then I agreed. That day quickly approaches. So recently, my mind has been wrapped up on the topic of love, what it means, what it is. Me, a man who has been constantly mystified, and confused, about the inner workings of That Thing which is not a machine, yet builds, not a tool, yet assists, and cannot see, yet seeks. What has dominated my thoughts, aside from what I should be doing, or want to be doing, or even need to be doing, is the day my father came into my room, years back, to give me the idea for a story. He had a composed tone that begged me to listen, and he outlined the idea as if he had taken great care in doing so. We didn't talk much in those days, a trend that has continued as such through the years, and that afternoon he had more words for me than he had during the entire previous mo...