Questions of Travel

I'm in New York right now, taking some vacation time to visit a few friends and revisit a world outside of my cozy Kansas City. Being here, I feel almost hyper. Still, I'm missing this little beansprout back home.

Fatal Toothpicks and Freebasing Moon Rocks

For close to a year, I have been writing every day.

"Writing" is a term I use loosely. What I really mean to say is "putting some ink on a piece of paper and crossing that act off my mental to-do list." Good days happen, like days when I really get to work on a poem. Those days feel nice. I can take a walk and take deep breaths and fall asleep without feeling antsy.

The majority of what I put on paper, though, is far less substantial. Most days are modest notes, far less likely to stand alone: tiny phrases that catch my ear, drawings of plants, and lots of lists: things I ate, streets I crossed, and descriptions of the voices on which I eavesdropped.

Some days, these notes are instead reminders of strange stories that I encounter. Did you know, for instance, that Sherwood Anderson died because he accidentally ate a toothpick? This was one of my notes on March 29. Please read this if you don't believe me.

While I am proud to make anything on these small days, I would not call them productive. I often leave those days feeling rushed and harried. I am, on the other hand, glad to have a habit like "writing" to anchor myself. Even though I sometimes feel discouraged by the "unproductive" days, it could always be worse. My daily habit could be scrolling without engagement through Perez Hilton, or perhaps freebasing moon rocks.

That's all my long-winded way of telling you that I'm trying to write more. To really make, or at least start making, new things every day. Even if they're immediately abandoned. I will do my best to share those dumb new tiny things on this here blog every once in a while.

Also, an art professor at CVS told me last night that he thinks my apartment is infested with bedbugs. He began speaking to me in Spanish. I responded in Spanish, and then he told me he didn't actually speak much Spanish and that he would prefer not to. I was buying cortisone cream because I've been pretty itchy.

Anyhow, that's been on my mind, so I'm sorry if this post seems a little distracted.

Here's trying.

Lying in a Hammock

"Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota"

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,   

Asleep on the black trunk,

Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.   

Down the ravine behind the empty house,   

The cowbells follow one another   

Into the distances of the afternoon.   

To my right,

In a field of sunlight between two pines,   

The droppings of last year’s horses   

Blaze up into golden stones.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.   

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.

- by James Wright, first published in The Paris Review (1961)