Thanks For The Trail

"Hobobob, do you think you will have breakfast with me this morning?"

I roll over onto my back, staring up at the ceiling. "Yeah, why not."

That's right. I give the fuck up. The incessant pounding of the surf on the beach of my resolve has finally given way to the flooding of one will over the other. My brother says that Igor has an angle. That there is some ulterior motive to his generosity. Well, there's only one way to find out. I rise from my bed and slip my legs over the side. I am transported, it seems, to the bathroom where I brush my teeth and stare at my tired features in the mirror. I look tired. The eyes of the foreigner's face in the reflection are drooping. The rabid mouth covered with foam. I don't look like I remembered. I am older, but not wiser. I am darker, but not enlightened. I am hard, but not softened by the passage of time. I am transforming into a new me. A different me. Far changed from the man that I was nearly three years ago.

Who was that man. I try to remember him. I remember faint outlines, the largess of a different life. What I once thought was a carefree existence now appears to be measured out in specific amounts. Given to me by my employer. I was allowed only to live 'this much' of my life at a time. On vacation days and Holidays and weekends. But materially, I was far better off.

Now is the fascinating tradeoff. I've reversed the roles. I have unlimited vacation days and Holidays. I don't have the cruel taskmaster. I'm free to do whatever it is that I want to do in the morning. Which means that I can devote much of my time to my writing, like a nine to five. But materially, I am poor. I am insolvent. I live with over fifty men in a barracks. I have to hit the streets during the day. I can't stay home unmolested and watch television. I can't stick my hand down my pants and scratch my balls whenever I want to.

But I'm supposed to be worse off than I was. Well, with a little stipend from my job and my mother, I have more money than I need. By keeping my desires down to a minimum, this is made possible. Was it not Jack Kerouac that said that if you have a rug you have too much? I'm beginning to belive in that man now. He certainly was on the road a lot, and he was a writer. I wonder if years down the line, once I perish, will these words in this blog live on, like the written diaries, works and letters of Mr. Kerouac, Chuck Bukowski, Herbert Hunkee, Allen Ginsberg, and others who had devoted their very lives to their writing, eschewing all else.

I have nothing, and I am still happy. I have close friends, my laptop, my family still. I have every thing that a man, or woman, actually needs. And everything essential to life is strangely immaterial. It floats on the air like an invisible smoke. No matter how much you disagree, you do not need that cellphone, that laptop, that television set, that car, that home. If a twister or hurricane was to pass through and demolish your home, apartment and furnishings, you will still survive. You will not die. You'll just move on.

I finish brushing my teeth and head with Igor out for breakfast. We sit in Think Coffee and I blog. While doing so, Igor takes up a seat next to me, and at intervals that becomes annoying, asks me to spell words for him. He hands a paper and pen across to me. "Can you spell 'expensive' for me?" Time and time again. To the point that I'm not too certain if I can keep a mental flow going.

The flow of my writing. That's a good way to put it. Once the thoughts start to come, I spill them on the page, like a flow of blood. I expose an arm, take a razor and draw it across tender flesh. It pares open and out spills the words that I will use today. They move out almost unconsciously, as if an inner person inside is saying, or more accurately writing these things.

That's one reason that I must apologize to many of you out there that talk to me. You ask me what did I mean when I said this, and that. The truth is that I don't fucking know. I know what I was feeling and thinking at the time, but I can't tell you what I meant unless I sat down and read the passage again to remind me of where I was in my mind when I wrote it. And to be brutally honest with you, sometimes I can't even then. I just don't know what will come out when it does. I just stare at a blank screen for a moment, let my mind wander, and out it pours.

That's just how I write. Now it comes to me effortlessly. I don't even think about it, it just comes out. I guess that's why my writing has a conversational quality to it, simply because I am talking to myself in my head.

I look at the young people in Think Coffee, all sitting with laptops open. This is the new age. The young are lightyears ahead of where I was when I was young. I thought that I was advanced when I took a calculator to school. And the privileged are even further ahead than the underprivileged. The gap is widening folks. Between them and us, between their age and ours.

Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, all of you guys, thanks for blazing a trail.

I don't feel so crazy now.

HobobobSource URL: http://idontwanttobeanythingotherthanme.blogspot.com/2008/09/thanks-for-trail.html
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