Tuesday, November 25, 2008

A snag in the forest of thought.

Twisting and craning, Everette Thomas cracked his back, rowed his shoulders, screwed his head, squeezed his hands into tight fists, growled a low, guttural 'fffuck you!,' and, releasing his fingers from their strangling huddle, let scatter the ashes of his rage out into the black, indifferent sea of his keyboard. Hanging over his twin-sized bed (which, by the way, took up nearly half his room), his right leg was jumping with energy driven by a highly caffeinated melange of two cups of coffee, common, spasmodic, drug-induced jittery, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, and just a little bit of remaining rage like sugar at the bottom of your first cup. He bit the tip of his thumb . . . too hard. 'Ouch! Fuck! Fuck you! Fuck your dumb fucking face. Fuck you!' he psuedoshouted in staccato fits. Trying his best to ignore his inner-criticism screaming at him: 'Coward! Fucking do something about it! What? - are you a fucking poet now?', he put his fingers to the keyboard and started typing: It's a shame that none of you are afforded the opportunity to see his ugly side and, before he could even punctuate, he was overcome by a wave of self-reproach. The jumping turned to a calm, steady foot tap. He cleared his throat and stared into the abysmal screen before him. Those words, that accusation, that power, no matter how truly obscure and menial, were his own; he could only part his lips in disgust with himself. Did any one of them suffer as he did? Could this be how everyone felt? Could everyone deal with this, too, on a daily basis? He needed to know, but he knew he never would. He had in his creative hands the veritable fate of a character he engendered into the world, but he felt like a social executioner the moment he attempted to abash that character's morality. What brought him to this seemingly insane juncture of the unreal and the real? Could it have been drugs? Was it his own doing? Was it inherent, pathological - not his fault? Furthermore (onward with optimism), could it be harnessed? He wondered, could it be lucrative to harness it? And his thoughts wandered on like that for some time, but those words still hung on the screen like a hex hanging over a cursed home. So when Everette slowly drifted away from consciousness, supine on his nude, pillow top mattress, his cat, Charlie (who's always in the mood for an arbitrary nap) - perched and floating on a piece of floorboard driftwood - jumped onto Everette's bed, landed on his keyboard, and sent those words hurling into the infinitesimal attention of his solipsistic peers.

1 comment:

My Idea of Fun said...

"It's a curse. Yes, it's a flame. It owns
you. It has possession over you. You are not the master of
yourself. You are consumed by this thing. And the books you
write. They're not you. They're not me sitting here, this
Henry Miller. They belong to someone else. It's terrible.
You can never rest. People used to envy me my inspiration.
I hate inspiration. It takes you over completely. I could never
wait until it passed and I got rid of it"