You are visited, often, in those final twitching moments of the day, by the inklings of an idea plainly woven through with gold.
Streaked at times, even, with the diaphanous brilliance of beatific wings illumined in the streaming bright of heaven’s heady spotlight.
Abloom, now and again, maybe, with the trumpeted bunched sunburst of daffodils the day after a soaking spring shower.
Some pretty nifty shit, in other words:
>>> A tossed-off phrase caressing the desiccated dark corners of the mind, until the appalling vastness of unused tinder smolders, sparking and spitting and crackling up into four-alarm flame, to launch pinwheels of candied air swirling in a heated torrent from the tongue.
>>> That elusive single defining trait, patently distinct but powerfully universal, which could, at long last, set in motion a sweeping narrative that struts and sweats and swaggers and swears with life.
>>> A plan of action, perhaps even just a small adjustment, that could alter the course of your own human events, to where life’s vast horizon vaults open in a soccer-hooligan chorus of bawdy hallelujahs, instead of simply tamping down, a door abruptly shut, and ringing with the echo of absolutely nothing.
>>> Etc., and golden etc.
This idea, this treasure, this hope, this achingly awaited nudge in a right direction, in any direction, arrives in a wealth of what-ifs, and bathed in the here-and-now in the weird blue glow from a lonely strand of Christmas lights, never boxed nor attic-bound back at New Year’s, and strung haphazardly along one bedroom wall. Lights you ritually switch on each night in the hope of provoking an environment of peace, where an addled mind might settle down like evening mist, then stay down, like morning dew.
So why must what could be, and could never be, always arrive at this unraveling time, this maddening time, this vanquishing hour? Always, just before the hammer of dissolve hits with such force that you bolt the bonds of consciousness, still sitting upright, your body then slumping abruptly forward, a hand-cradled cup of red wine more than once tumbling from vacant fingers into bed, hurtling you back awake in the sudden realization that your legs are being soaked in the fermented essence of bygone fruit, and staining the sheets so profoundly that your spouse will have a second’s wonder, upon waking and flipping on the light the next morning, with you already downstairs stumbling catatonic through your pre-workday ritual, if you were mortally wounded in the night, crawling off to some corner of the house to end in a bloodless heap, the remainder of your liquid life in a congealing halo all around you.
But by 3 a.m., almost daily, when you awake from dead sleep in a cold-soul chill, cooking slowly in your own skin, with any last-night treasure of an idea, if even to be recalled now in the mind’s cloudy eye, muddied over, increasingly obscure, with any faint residual shine evaporating away from the insistent internal heat that haunts you. Still, you strain after what it was, what it might have been. Or, if you’d chanced to jot it down in your slipping mental state, to understand why then you even bothered — because whatever it was then, when it alighted so very bright upon you, it simply isn’t now, dull instead as old pig-iron.
What’s left to you at this point but to tumble violent like loosed scree into the coming day, a fitful collapse into those fleeting last few hours that should be given over to restful sleep? Instead, the long angry stretches of wide-eyed awake, peppered with fleeting dreams riddled with the savagely mundane, the same obscure pointless task presented to you to be completed, again and again, even as your traitorous brain keeps insisting to you, as if to add insult to injury: This isn’t real, friend; it’s just a dream; this isn’t real, it’s just …
But, ah.
But, oh.
But here we go, here we go, here we go …
Again.
And so transpires the ugly slide down deep into the mines, the vacuous mental caverns flooded with the mocking darkness that sweeps in when a light that arose so quickly, and seemed so true, goes out in but the blink of a single bleary eye. And increasingly, day in and day out, day after blasted day, you are formed out of the absence, addled, unrested, and forever seeking the passionate expectation of barely glimpsed gold, but finding instead only tangled sheets, hollow tracks of straining words and the archaeology of bleach-blotched wine stains, echoes of so much, so very, very much, of nothing.
And that, boys and girls, is how this ceaseless bleak season of writer’s block feels to me.
Ideas can be such monstrous things, with no regard for how badly we need them to ignite, to burst in a cascade of blinding fireworks against the formidable black, or unfold like a tawdry tropical flower from the simple dullness of now. To act as some goddamn beacon alit against the monotonous fog of another zombie tomorrow.
And oh, how very badly we need those fleeting fuckers to be true.
But.
<Post likes lost from original blogsite>
