Let Me Sleep It's Christmas Time--1997 (ii)

I drove and I smoked. I chased golden splashes of autumnal light. I took deep slurps of java. Occasionally I fired up a cigar, zipping down a forgotten country road, wondering what would happen if I left everything behind me. If I discarded the worthless putt-putt I was steering behind an abandoned Silo in a small town. If I hopped a train headed west, everything I needed stored inside my fingertips; stored inside the wild contours of my heart, the picture of my beloved crinkled inside the folds of my wallet.

I mused over Buddhist adages--how the Dhamapada insists that the further one travels the less one knows. How my mentor Mark-Andrew had a tatoo of the phrase, "He who does not know where he is going, will go furthest," eteched into his flesh.

I clung to these adages like a life vest as I traveled into the open pastures and harvested meadow land christening the majority of my state. I then laughed out loud, thinking of mock X-rated adages we had memorized over lunch trays in junior high.

Confucious says: It is good to meet girl in park, but better to park meat in girl.

"Life," I thought, pumping my elbow as I reeled down the drivers' side window and yelled out into the thick cool flaps of Novemeber wind, "How serious can you take it?"

I had no itinerary, no destination, no port. The gravel swerves and tortuous sways of the road shepherded each subtle tilt of the steering wheel. I passed through towns with population less than three hundred. A water tower and a Casey's General seemed to be the social hub for the entire county.

I was lost, yet I had never felt so sure of where I was going.

I've always secretly despised individuals who could make it from point A to point B with such ease and facility. Despised them then, anyway. I abhorred my siblings for escaping the genital wart of P-town; hated them for accomplishing something with their parental approving artistic medium. I hated peers who could attend college classes without having to work full time. Hated them until I read the introduction to William Gaddis' RECOGNITIONS where author William Gass posits that art, like life doesn't obey the linear trek from point A to point B--It's more like you're on the Eisenhower in Chicago during rush hour and you've missed your exit. You can hear the clamoring din of gridlock surrounding you. You've already gone through a pack of cigarttes and you're trying to shovel through the glove compartment to locate a map--to find out just where you are. The cell phone is ringing off the hook; whizzing an annoying tune your ex-girlfriend programed because the theme song from DAWSON CREEK gives her romantic nostalgia. A grandmother driving a Mercedes behind you is giving you the finger and just as you locate where you think you are headed on the map--you realize that you are holding the map upside down, and then you realize that it's not even the map of your own state--it's not even a map of your damn country--it's a map of Canada and all this time you THOUGHT you knew where you were headed, you really had no fucking clue.....Yeah, Gass asserts, life is like this, and thank God.

I continued to drive, the faster I drove the more time seemed to melt into a button of past experiences that no longer seemed to mattered. I thought about lovers, about poetry, about the concept of an aged, dottard God whose meaning seemed to differ from continent and tongue yet whose message remained constant. I thought about the borders of language; about universality of physics-- the cosmological tilt of the planet; our solar address, the aquatic bulb of planet earth, heavily turning its countenance of riddled land rashes into the solar lens of a nuclear hearth 93 million miles away.

Throughout his inspiring creative-surging lecture series Joseph Campbell notes the spiritual importance of a "Sacred Place"--a place of "spiritual incubation" a palce where you are free to be completely yourself--a place where you can let the long tresses of your hair stream freely from your skull.

I've dubbed my sacred places, with respect, by the moniker"vagina"--a place of pyschological rebirth; that golden November afternoon I landed in one of my vaginas--and I emerged different, changed, reborn.

Someday I plan on writing an autobiographical account entitled "Matthiessen Grace" about my sojourns to Matthiessen state Park, located near Ottawa, Illinois. It is my vagina--my creative womb; a place where I can let my untethered soul soar naked amongst the thick stalks of wild trees.

Everytime I leave Matthiessen Park something changes. I come home changed. I come home to new lovers; new employment--one time, to the sudden death of my father.

The park is arrayed in wildlife vectors--a huge waterfall coasting through the center of a park--hollow dells; a dented geological souvenir of the last Ice Age that somehow escaped us.

Over the years I've promenaded under icy waterfalls, skipped across hidden paths, bathed naked with hippies in the nearby Vermillion river, smoked weed with with peripatetic gypsies, felt at peace with the earth.

That Novemeber afternoon seven years ago, I ended up in Matthiessen State Park, about two hours north of Peoria. I was all alone. I escorted my heavy thoughts beneath the vacant garments of skeletel trees limbs. It was autumn, rich with hard-candy leaves; bouquets of lavender and orange flames raked across the pasture in a tidal wave of leafy foam.

Deer brushed throughout the park that day. I counted more than fifteen brown blurs cantering from the corner of my eye. I sat in front of the lower dells, watching water gush and flow from the bottom of the falls. I was all alone, my heart bleeding down my chest, into my stomach, feeling, for the first time, full.

I left that the park that night late; the indigo eye-liner sky gently sealed its lids into darkness, I drove home. I removed the photograph of Megan and instead thought about my co-worker, Jana; the girl I flirted with incessantly at work. I drove home, still smoking, still skiing through speed limits, but I drove home and returned to that place I had I had left ten hours earlier, that palce that I seemed to be coming back to after all this time.

Holiday Blogg-Nogg

Spent the last few days traveling around Illinois, engulfed in a constant stream of holiday commerce. Merry Christmas Migraine. Finished all my Christmas shopping w/out going too much in debt (indulged court side seats at the Bulls-Celtics game this coming January--holiday splurge for myself and my best friend, fellow sports writer John "yer mom's SO HOT" Danish)....

Bumped into my ex-girlfriend Kristina in Barnes-n-Nobles. I hadn't seen her in about five years and I didn't recognize her. She blinked her eyes and called out my name and I shrugged my shoulders unphased. She was seven months pregnant ( !!!!!) and has been mara-married for about three years. My mom was with me--Mom always LOVED Kristina and after accumulating the gall to re-introduce myself to the girl I took to East Peoria's 1996 prom;(Memories to dancing to "KILLING ME SOFTLY") after staring into the blue-willow pools of her eyes and feeling blessed that I don't have a morgage and a family to furnish with my unfinished novel, I told my mom that, "Ooops, there goes 'yer ex-daughter-in-law."

Mother and Kristina have always had a Ruth and Naomi type of rapport. When I finally broke up with Kris, I think my mom cried more than I did. Actually Kristina has a fat ass (sad but true) and on prom I kept picking her fat ass up and twirling her around, as if her Lane Bryant assenting torso were the width of a baton.

I got a hernia two days later.

It was weird. I guess sometimes the romantic residue of a person stays inside you even though you'd rather they leave. One time Kristina and I were watching a video in her parents basement, having a typical high-school post-prom pelvic thrust make-out session and later on the night, after I kissed her porcelain astro dome forehead goodbye and guzzled my vehicle across the banks of the Illinois river, only then I noticed that sometime during the night, Kristina had doffed her necklace, a sliver cubed K, and had clipped it around the contours of my own neck. I have no clue when she could have done this--it wasn't like I was conciously monitoring her every slight feline movement--but sometime that night she pinned her love around my neck and I didn't realize it until hours later.

Seems like a metaphorical mirror of life--shit happens and you don't realize it until later---the ramification of our every crazy longing--our art having effects on total strangers.

Today at lunch I was reading proofs for my professor upcoming "dazzling" novel WHITE LIGHT. I had a batch of my own poems scattered like leaves across the table. One poem was called AFTER SEX MY GIRLFRIEND AND I TALK ABOUT WHERE WE WERE WHEN CHALLENGER EXPLODED. I wasn't paying attention and the waitress (whose name was also Kris) told me abruptly: "I was in fourth grade."

I had no clue what she was talking about until she pointed at the title of my poem. I didn't intend for her to read the poem, but she kept on my prying.

"I was in first grade" I told her.

"They took us in from the cafeteria. They had it playing in all the classrooms." She said.

"Everyone made a big deal because a teacher was in space." I said.

After I saw Kristina last week--I swear--it felt like I was wearing that unsuspecting silver necklace once again. I could feel the cold steel slinking down my neck as I watched Kristina give my mom a hug (?) and then lumber, very pregnant, out of the wooden dentures of the bookstore. All the joys and lies of that dubious summer came back to me and I could feel her--her clean mouth and sunset eyelashes--her silence--could feel all of this, as I made a lame joke to my mom about the one that gottaway......

____________________________

Early in BEFORE SUNSET Jesse (Hawke) informs an interviewer that he wants to write a novel that takes place solely during the discourse of a pop song. I've been having writers block lately (which has transitioned into writers avenue; writers suburbia; writers continent) and so, as a holiday activity, I figured I'd plagerize this idea. The pop song is called "LET ME SLEEP IT'S CHRISTMAS TIME" is one of Pearl Jam's most beloved B-sides. I'll let the bloggs speak for themselves, but it'll cover a young man looking for himself around the holidays--ardently searching for joy....

Alpha and Omega Omlette

Showed my screenwriting teacher the romantic see-saw of BEFORE SUNSET/BEFORE SUNRISE. He told me that, seeing Julie Delpy on screen, he felt that, if he could some how touch her--she would save him. Heal him.

Watching those two movies again for me was weird. It was the first time watching BEFORE SUNRISE since multiple grunge-infested viewings in the mid-late nineties--In real life I'm OLDER than the two lovers (yet I still feel twelve, perks o' my profession) and watching the movie I felt older; or at least emotionally mitigated. It was interesting.....