Sometimes I don’t know I’ve slowed down, run into the wall, let the boulder roll back downhill and had it settle, until I write a poem about Sisyphus. If I were to do a calendar analysis of the last year and find a way to map the Sisyphean references in poetry to my mood and life, I think there would be some wonderful insights (the references would have to be coded to the part of the boulder-mountain cycle the reference implies that I’m in at the time).
Here’s a secret, which if you’ve gotten to the second paragraph of chapter six, I suppose you get to know: I write poetry not about things, but from where I’m at. Publishing poetry where I’m at is like having that Find My Friends feature on (is that part of Facebook?) – you get to know where I’m at and where I was at, and I guess anyone who wants to know gets to know too. If anyone is ever litigating against me and my mood or state of mind is at issue in the court case, I should probably remove the date and time stamps from my WordPress posts (by the way, this book was originally published on WordPress, for free, so sorry if you’re reading it when it has a spine or an audio book reader and it was for money, but you’re actually able to read it without trying to fight my website’s difficult navigation, so that was probably worth money; and the publisher probably made me edit it, so that might be worth money to you as well).
It’s raining, it’s morning, it’s April. I was thinking about how yesterday and now today’s writing was coming out differently and concerned that it might make the cells of this book unwilling to live in the same body, with the same skin and spine. But then I thought about that. I often have things coming out of me differently (we’ll stick to non-physical things here, but it’s true of both (though I did bring you in on the pooping the other day, if I remember correctly)). There are “waves” as I’ve heard them described quite recently (audio book reader, please read those quotes as a metaphor quote, not a scare quote). Sometimes those waves are predictable, sometimes they should have been predictable, and sometimes they are complete surprises. Mine are usually in the third category, even though they are often also in the first two categories. I wasn’t surprised when I hit a deer with a car at some point in my life (not being specific, because insurance companies don’t think I’ve ever hit a deer and I wouldn’t put it past them to adjust my rates based on a blog or maybe one day published book – but joke’s on them, I’m getting rid of my car next month). But I am surprised when I’m sad, irritable, and stuck. I think I need to channel my inner hitting-a-deer while driving when I’m dealing with the reality of myself (which is change, or The Transformation of Things, depending on which Zhuangzi translation you like better – waiting on you to get that next one done Dr. Slingerland (I’m going to make vague references to things you probably have to Google (though I recommend DuckDuckGo to add a little friction to your Internetting) so that you can read this book on paper without having to click on things)).
I used to love building nested formulas in Microsoft (MS) Excel. I didn’t really like crunching numbers, but the fleeting feeling of power when you first VLOOKUP in order to SUMIF is pretty amazing (I had a similar experience when I learned MS Access, but I won’t go on a long diatribe about how primary keys and database architecture have ruined the design of organizations, products, and relationships right now, even though I want to a little bit).
The rain is still falling at exactly the same rate, my coffee cup is empty, and my fingers are a little cold. I learned recently that I can use a pair of gloves that I own to type when my fingers would otherwise be too cold to do so, and I’m reminded of my first Internet meme obsession where a guy (a cartoon) with boxing gloves on would type snarky responses to emails (Strongbad, if you remember – Trogdor was a man; or maybe he was a dragon man). Maybe it’s a “fo-paw” (good luck with this enunciation project, audio book reader) quoting Internet memes in a book-length thing that people might read well after I’m gone after Internet memes from the early 2000s have bit rotted away, but Shakespeare sure didn’t write in timeless English. It’s the themes that are timeless, like snappy dialogue between two men-at-arms in Danish castles being just about the most entertaining thing ever (next to the tortured, slippery slope to familial murder when ghosts tell you who dun it; might be better if that were less timeless).
This is a shorter chapter because my coffee cup is smaller, I’m not wearing my typing gloves, and there aren’t a hundred people on Zoom working away at the same time as me. But when I’ve read books, I’ve noticed that the chapters are not all always the same length, so there is precedent.
Roman Ryan 