word is (re)born.

here in our cyclical world – not the grand-karma, circle-of-life kind so much as it is the repetitious, dulls-the-senses kind of cyclical; think spinning tires and asphalt and the dank intrusive smell of hot rubber – we are in what looks to be arm’s length of a tipping point. a new beginning, if you will. now, granted. we may have tried very hard not to notice, but by now we cannot help being at least partly aware that every weekly flip of the calendar seems to bring with it a warbling internal rhapsody about new beginnings or tipping points. on this particular monday (sounds like someone’s got a case of them!) we are nonetheless convinced that it’s a new day. for one, slowly and unavoidably i have become aware that my every serious desire to be formatively productive is a reaction to my well-worn inclination to a) party b) lay down or c) lay down and party; not only that, but my desire to hypothesize and rhapsodize about the above realization has at last at last evaporated. so. from our vantage here in the back of the café, it would seem that we have backed ourself into a corner: change closes in from every side. as recently as yesterday i’ve talked about needing a catalyst – a spark. an agent of change. but today i breathe a sigh, rub my eyes, and raise my head to see that every book on the shelf calls for revolution; every napkin on the counter begs to be frantically scribbled upon; every album in the folder promises to make our eyes wide with love. resistance is … not “futile,” exactly. but it’s been done. so let’s experiment.

lately i have been of a serious mind to seriously re-engage with the story i’m in the middle of; efforts have been stifled by my internal quibblings as to the voice and motives of the narrator. it is baffling only in the mildest sense, yet enough for me to scribble aimlessly about how i want to recast the character, a process wherein my eyes are too often narrowed and i end up using the word “theme” in every other sentence. i have never liked journal-writing, but essentially this is just what i’ve been doing: journaling on the behalf of my protagonist. one of the few things i know for sure about the character is that the idea of keeping a journal appalls him – just decide what you think and move on, already. the strength of his feeling on this matter, coupled with his page-one compulsion to begin to write his friend letters nearly every day, is part of what is supposed to give him some duplicity or depth – to make him interesting. this is all prelude. what will happen in the coming days is that every now and again hal will be given the floor; he’s got this idea that if he were to write a journal-type entry about his conception of and treatment by the author, then i would just leave it alone and finish the f’ing story already. stay tuned.