It’s either the first or second day of summer. The wind is blowing, so fast that the clouds are the whole sky and then the sun is out and then gone again. How’s that for a plot? It’s morning. Cool air. Windows are open. A handful of bicycles roll by. Keeping my saplings from blowing over. I am surrounded by plants. They are everywhere. The bag of coffee in the cupboard is getting a little past its prime, hopefully tomorrow is its final day. Perhaps I’ll just grind the rest of the bag and put it in the fridge with water. That would be a productive use, a high-utility mechanism for extracting value from these faded beans. I can feel the economics PhD glowing in my cabinet (I have neither a cabinet, nor any such piece of paper, and I believe it might stink in there rather than glowing, though these are not mutually exclusive effects).
I’m not working right now. Unless this writing is work. It seems though, that the only work I’m doing is making sure to put enough food in my body. It’s a lot of work. Plenty of work. Particularly because I often ride my bicycle several hours to get to places where I eat. I think I’ll do that today, after eating beforehand. Orders of events, in a habit: seems like an appropriate approach to a Monday. The first summer Monday, the coolest day in a month. I like the cold.
Sometimes life seems to unfold in fragments, at other times it feels as though it is a single pane of glass. Either way, handling the edges carefully seems necessary (and cuts are inevitable). Lately, in the last day, the fragmentary nature of life is particularly shardy. The appropriate response is to briefly be steeped in the fragments, and then articulate and reality-make a more consistent theme of glass. A very long biography or history book in my ear on a very long bike ride is usually the perfect remedy to rebalance the fragmentation sine curve toward one, from many. And when things feeling a little too one-ish, a rebalancing toward fragmentation, a soft-shattering must accompany the larger and larger glass. Collages, melting down the fragments, mixing, then shattering again. Recognizing the stage in the collage vs. melting down process is the key to riding these waves with some level of aplomb. I’m still in a middle-school ability level of recognition, as well as in preposition use. At a level? Of preposition use? Who could say, except perhaps a middle school grammar teacher. I think the audio book reader will stumble over the willy-nilly prepositional nature above along this reading. My apologies. Unless it all gets edited out, then I take it all back. You’ll have an editor to thank for that sweet natural flow, the mortar between the shards of glass. It’s like the mulch that surrounds yard-plants. I guess forests produce their own mulch over the years, so it’s only natural that we grind up trees and scatter their flesh over our yards. Like any good editor.
Sometimes I feel the urge to stop writing. To lay down on the couch. To make more coffee. To touch my plants gently and feel the alive. To eat and eat and eat, and bike and bike and bike. And these urges, I typically listen to them. Because there’s no reason to write instead. And sometimes I write, with the urge and against the urge. I’m not sure what “art” is, but I do have a little idea of what words are, and what they can seem to do when they are strung together. And stringing them together is a little like a story I heard about a chimney sweeper (sweep? is it just the verb as the name? maybe I’m a “write” from time to time.) I heard recently. The chimney sweep is unresponsive to most communications and fails to show up to a few of the scheduled appointments to do the sweep. But when he does show up, he doesn’t just push a vacuum up the chimney and call it a day. He goes all the way in. He scrubs that chimney until there mortar between the brick is back to its original color. He comes out covered in soot and then cleans the glass in front of the fireplace. He’s been in the zone for hours before he comes up for clean air and pronounces the chimney swept. Having been so in the zone, he’s missed four other jobs that had been scheduled, probably. But he’s done a thing that brings satisfaction in the doing and in the outcome. And some people greatly appreciate a completely clean fireplace vent-tunnel. This is how I feel about sentences and paragraphs.
Roman Ryan 