It is not my Sock Joao.

 

Nope, not my sock.  But I was kind 

enough to knock it down to the 

basement apartment.  The guy on andar 3

can knock on their door if he really

wants it.

Tuesday morning arrives in Lisboa. Bright sun today and the sky is clear.  A slight breeze brings smells through my apartment’s French windows from the snack bars and coffee shops scattered along the street below. When I move to my balcony table I see people starting to move. Young men in blue suits and women in blousy pants with backpacks are trickling off to work.  The morning has begun, and I want to see what this day holds.

Coffee time is over and I carry my cup into the kitchen. In the process of moving yesterday's dishes out of the dishwasher and into the cupboards, I think that if I don't start writing soon, my thoughts, my energy, and my focus will all drift away. Energy and ideas will fly from my mind with the speed of the parakeets abandoning Rua Pedro Nunes in the twilight. I stop for a moment and think of those wild spiraling birds flashing by in the near darkness to some unknown point of evening rest (I guess). So, to juice my mind I pick up my iPhone and pick a playlist; the time is now to hear the weekly Chill playlist for Jay Todd. Music makes kitchen chores easier and faster.

The first song up is Paul Simon’s Hearts and Bones. And with that song’s soft but insightful words in my ears I realizedwhat I would like to write. I want to craft poetic prose whose soul lies just beyond the easily accessible. Prose that if you dig for it you will find joyfully delightful.  I want my words to flow off the page into a small number of people’s brains giving them joy or making them think or evoking true feelings. Ultimately, I hope to create stories that evoke emotion, inspire thought, and leave an impression for more than just a moment.

I mean there are papers I read that thrill me that never get into my Apple News feed, nor will they ever. The things I read aren’t about some actor’s secret illness hidden for twenty years. They aren't about a game of political chess that screws upreal people living real lives on the margins in America. The things I love most come to me through newsletters and mailing lists. As I pour over them they open rabbit holes into seams of cascading poems, songs, essays about life and all that it entails. In my reading I wrap myself in the words of folks just off center enough to be considered out of step but not subject to institutionalization.

As I read their paragraphs quickly, my thoughts bubble wildly and fire off in a hundred directions. Reading a short Simon Blackburn article on an esoteric philosophical debate or ingesting a sideways collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s thoughts on humanity’s propensity for destruction tucked in among some essays in a collection most will skip reminds me of the joy inwell-written but off-center works. And then there is a visceral feeling of loss when I hear a Tom Waits song like The Fall of Troy. Yeah, I want to write something that good.

Too bad I don’t have the tools. The truth is, I have a lot of words, big and small, and four letter words.  But what I lack arethe mechanics. Verb and noun agreement, yeah I could do better. Dangling pieces of sentences, participles, prepositions and gerunds all get me running. I think I lack these tools partly due to spending too much time stoned in my freshman and sophomore years of high school. 

Another part of the reason I don’t have the tools is because I believe the rigor of writing was lost on teachers in the era of the "new journalism" prevailing when I came through high school. Diagramming sentences, constructing paragraphs that were basically logical syllogisms, you know a premise, followed by a second premise, and then a conclusion fell by the wayside in those years. In 1970-1974 good writing consisted of word salad blasted out on a page in different fonts with italics and scribbled drawings tucked in amidst the text, e.g., Breakfast of Champions. Writing during the 1970s was distinctly unconventional and unstructured and a generation of public school students suffered because of it.

I still have a chance with these programs that promise to clean up grammar and clarify poorly constructed paragraphs and sentences.  In the next few years, maybe I'll write that novella. Five chapters will follow someone's journey from a small farm town in America to a large foreign capital. Dedication and time are all I lack. Giggles here.

Here is The Fall of Troy. It is one of Loren’s favorites.