simple sentences

so far this week has been pretty soft and mellow, mostly because i am so busy that i have had to schedule and compartmentalize my days, which, in truth, when i am home and when i am working towards something, i like to do. i have been whole heartedly working on my stories this week and i found my black working journal that i keep all my story ideas in. reading through some of these things is terribly funny. as any writer or any artist knows, most of what is jotted down will never ever be used. and for good reason. my aptitude for becoming a creepy dude for a play i was working on is hilarous. 

the one thing i do miss from the stint when i freaked out, went back to undergraduate college, and took a whole bunch of film and screenwriting classes for no good reason except wasting time and racking bills, was this treatment i wrote on Miki Dora. i still have all of the notes in my journal, but my computer crashed during that fateful and dumb return, so the document itself has disappeared.

going back to school was unfair at that level. i was already primed. 

so it was decided that i will definitely pursue my doctorate in English. so i am working on that, which, for some reason, makes me span even more time writing and submitting work. if i do not work on my stories or poems for a while, i always feel like i will forget something. but it never happens. i've been writing the same story since i was in third grade. only for a while i tried to trick myself out of it, but i am back to it. probably because no one is looking and probably because the pursuit of placement in some obscure journal does not strike when it comes to my stories. they are mine. i got my mfa in poetry writing and i have not been able to write a poem since i graduated. since probably before i graduated, when there was so much focus on the concise parts where everything was cut apart and piecemeal and i could not find myself in the words anymore. i feel like it was too fingered over, it became too sterile under too many eyes and really, i probably only had my imagination going for me. 

i could not write a poem now. not even if i really wanted to. the map in my skull wants bold and sprawling moods, it wants rooms to walk around in. it wants a story. and only stories it wants to hear. if anything, the formal education of poetry writing helped just that.

i remember crying when i had to read those poems that i worked all those years on, from that little red book, in front of so many people. that is what poetry does to me. it puts me in my own face it makes me want to tell my own sad and fractured stories again and again and again until i am more than blue, until i am one foot in the grave. and then someone else has to edit. they have to be practical and economical and smart about the construction they make it more functional they make it more accessible more publishable. but i am still blue and by the time it is done, the whole poem seems like dumb emotion like sad patchwork of far better stories written down and down to fit on fortune cookies.

when i write stories i do not feel the compulsion to talk about myself. i do not feel the compulsion of ego at all. i just feel dedicated to my characters and the rooms the sounds and the birds and the sun. i feel the atmosphere and the dream. and it does not matter to me if there is no place for such things because these stories are far closer to me than anything i have written.

so i will probably be broke for most of my life, especially if i am pursuing a doctorate and especially if i am only writing stories for myself. but there is not much in the world that i want beyond what i can make for myself. except for a passport and seeing the cherry blossoms in japan next year. 

i start working at the welding shop on thursday to help out my dad. i am going to work there through the summer to get some extra money together, especially because i won't be teaching again until fall and college applications and entrance tests are expensive.

i heard springsteen played a lot from Born In the USA on friday night, including "dancing in the dark", which is my most favorite song in the world. figured the one time i don't seem him when he comes to tampa and he finally plays the songs i want to hear. the world is terribly amusing.