Editor’s Note: The arrival of Marlow’s thoughts- the unfinished ones- was timely this morning. They are bracing and add context to this morning’s attempt to understand what happened in the Opera Buffe on The Hill, the mess in Ukraine and two other regional conflicts in motion now. It is a time of great and fundamental change. And as Marlow demonstrates, it can require a positive transformation…

–       Vic

Long ago one April

Unfinished Manuscript

Pages from an unfinished Dr Seuss book manuscript (courtesy Saunders Auctions)

Not writing is no good but trying to write when words fail you stinks.  Writing about writer’s block is better than not writing at all, so . . . .

I am quite used to sitting in a small room, in front of a computer keyboard and making words cascade down a screen like black snowflakes against a white sky.  So when the words are not forthcoming, I won’t get up and walk away from my digital typewriter.  Why?  All I’d have left would be the sickness which started me typing in the first damn place.

I have witnessed enough of mankind in supermarkets, 7-11s, freeways, bars, restaurants and windowless, humorless rooms of war.  One can´t help but do this after living for six plus decades.  I’ve tried it all — war, women, travel, marriage, children, the works.  I suppose I wanted to know about things, what made them work.  So, I don’t feel like kicking myself in the ass for not watching things carefully for new material.  It’s true even sometimes for those gatherings, when the drinks are free and I have a designated driver ride home.

For better or worse, I don’t get much inspiration from what is current.   It’s the same old thing in disguise.  Only one thing comes without a disguise, and you only see it once, or maybe never, like getting hit by a whistle-less freight train or a car that runs a red light.

I´ve got enough clay to fiddle with in my writing.  But as time passes, forgetfulness is emptying me.  So, in spite of myself, I must refill.

I´m not sure what´s best for me in this regard.  Should I sit somewhere, smoke a short cigar and watch.   Seldom do I think doing that would lead to a chance meeting of a rare or interesting person.  I think the endless waiting would make me goddamn grouchy and off I’d go in search of a river of whiskey and music played so damn loud I couldn’t think.  That worked for a long time down here in Key West.

Maybe what’s needed is reinventing myself, changing my tone and shape often so I don’t fully categorize myself.  Or fall into ruts.  Reinvigoration.  Reinvention.   Self-taught.  Your history and present belong only to you.

When the words flowed in the past, I was never sure whether what I had written was good or bad.  No matter its quality, it likely was due to the low-down southern whiskey I was drinking.    This brown magic juice made my heart beat faster and sometimes helped my mind see things.  It certainly dulled the ache that came with the deadly drone of life.

My spirits were lifted each time I saw that the very poor and very rich extremes of society were allowed to mingle freely in the dives I frequented.  But I didn’t get why my spirits were often so low.  It took decades, not hours, days, months, or years of feeling absolutely terrible and that nothing would change that; neither health professionals, changes of diet, drink, humility, or God would fix it.   I should have awakened and stopped insisting on clearing my head and cleared my damn aching heart instead.

I was like waiting and waiting.  Didn’t I know that waiting was one of the things that drove folks crazy or killed them dead?  I saw it in the lives of others.  People waited all their lives.  Most waited to live, the truly hopeless waited to die.  We waited in line to buy toilet paper at the market. We waited in line in front of unmanned bank machines for money.  Those who didn’t have any money waited in longer lines downtown in unemployment offices, shelters and soup kitchens.  All of us waited to go to sleep and then waited to awaken.   When it was dry, we waited for it to rain.  Then we waited for it to stop.  We waited to eat and then we waited some more to eat again.  Some waited to get married and others waited, sometimes too long, to get divorced.  We waited in the courtroom with a bunch of other unhappy couples for the judge to issue the dissolution order.  Afterwards I wondered no more if I was finally going to stop waiting and start living.

But that courtroom event happened much, much later, and only after I had started to die.   I didn’t get that I was dying by my own hand just to get away from her.

There were signs, sad ones, that it wasn’t working early on.  Even when times were what appeared to be okay, we didn’t sing or laugh, or even argue.  We sat across from one another, eating and drinking in darkness.  Afterwards I would smoke cigarettes or cigars.  Later, when we went to sleep, I didn’t put my feet on her body nor she on mine like we used to.  We would sleep without touching.

When I saw the signs for what they were and got it, I fought for each minute.  I fought to fight for what was possible within myself, so that my life and death would not be like the others.  I had nothing to really get away from except for one person.

The problem up till then was that I kept choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what I chose, these bad things sliced a just little bit more off of me, until there was almost nothing left.  At the age of 45 when most people were just beginning a new phase of life, I was almost finished.

I finally learned from the regrouping and the moving on.   I had been stricken with fear for decades.   I feared failure so much that I almost died — too conditioned, too used to being told what to do.  It began with the family, ran through parochial school, church and finally thirty plus years in the military-industrial world.  Failure wasn’t an option, but strangely death was.

I wasn’t lonely back then.  I had lots of friends, close ones.   Oddly I experienced no self-pity.  I was just caught up in a life in which I could find no meaning.

We had lots of laughs.  Then we started to laugh when there was no reason to laugh.  That should have signaled that we were crazy.  Were we nuts?   Who knew?  Insanity is comparative.  We told ourselves that it depended on who set the norm.  When a stranger said in our earshot, “those guys are nuts.” we curiously felt honored.

I should have looked honestly in a mirror.  Maybe I’d have seen my real self.  Like somewhere  . . . suddenly . . . say in a large mirror in a furniture store . . . bloodshot eyes like little ladybugs . . . face contorted, a bit demented, a freaking mess. Yet, when I did look, I saw the regular guy I felt I was.   My God, I’d say to myself, I’m glad I’m not one of them.

Now that I have recovered, there is finally something here for death to take away.

I know that I can’t beat death, but I have finally beaten death in life.  The more often I learned to do it every day, the more light was in my life.   Since my life is my life, I know it while I got it.

I haven’t died
yet
and I have certainly
lived

thank God that I’m alive
tonight
We are only given
so many evenings
each wasted evening is
a gross violation against the natural course of your one and only life.

Dying will come easy:
like the 5 AM trains I
hear when
I’m asleep on my
side

I am blocked no more.

– words from an unfinished manuscript

–       Marlow

Copyright 2023 My Aisle Seat
www.vicsocotra.com