There is an Englishman in my head and he’s been there since I was about 15 years old. He speaks to me, and he says everything I want to hear.
I have thusly relieved myself of a great burden.
So I managed a great acceptance today: It is imperative that I look both ways, that I check the blind spots two or three times really, it is for the best. In lieu of standing my ground I may elect the option of giving way, live and let live, in consideration of speed, distance and mass. It’s the best course. I’m not taking care of myself in many other ways, but I’m going to, I swear, starting if not right now, right near now. And in so doing, everything about me will sing this:
I want to live.
From the moment I pry open my eyes to the moment I cement them shut. In the body and out. With sun and with shade, and with the evening ending atmosphere that seems to come around here all the time. I can live with that. I can feel the ions’ tiny smacks. My psychic posture is one of uprightness, arms out, head bowed slightly and eyes closed in gratitude, three-quarters right head turn. Now that I think of it, you could run up behind me with a cross and nail my psyche to it and it would look perfectly natural. But my psyche is not sacrificing, I assure you.
It’s just stretching out to create more surface area.
I have to feel more air. I have to hear more stories. I have to reflect more light.
I have to live.
And if you want to know why your first guess is correct: what else can any one of us do? Setting that aside, I think I want to live because I am, archeologically speaking, not in order. I believe if I die now I am going to leave a mess. Not a personal one, a pooling one that requires a special service to eradicate, but a mess along the line of a few drawers and shopping bags, sloppily filled and stowed,that would reveal something not particularly important about my life, which I am living right now to the fullest, but nevertheless would be very revealing. I’ll try again.
There is, throughout my studio, deep inside something else, which undoubtedly someone would run across in the course of things, something that would throw everything into a different light. And sadly! It is really of no importance that I have the Penthouse Magazine from 1989 featuring the interview with Sandra Bernhardt, but heavily creased in the pictorial of a turn of the century strip poker party played by two (who’s counting?) women. And the twenty or thirty rolls of monofilament, each with about 6 feet missing due to the fact the prior roll was purchased, trimmed, and promptly lost? It says nothing about me. And the conversations? The hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of screed, once admired for its swirly longhand now fully indecipherable two minutes after it’s been written? Ignore. Make no comparison to the sketchbooks of Crumb’s psychotic and clearly more talented brother. That would hurt me even though I would be already dead. The hurt would come after me like a brick through the window of my afterlife, and make me shudder in embarrassment, wince at the hubris. Don’t. What about the disgusting? Can it really be that I came home twelve years ago, undressed and fell asleep drunk then awoke to be missing my underpants, soaked in nonoxyl-9 as I thought them to be, but undiscoverable? Is it true they were always there, undetected, packed and unpacked and repacked after moving to four different residences since that time? Have you just found them as you pore over my effects in the wake of my untimely death, when I have not been able to find them lo these many years and countless attempts and rationalizations? Do you think I have a wierd ritual panty thing now? I do not. It’s not that. It can be explained. I will live to find them and take them from you prematurely so you do not have to go through the pain and bewilderment of their discovery. Nothing motivates me more to stay alive than finding my underwear before a grieving loved one does.
I am driven. I am filled with the life force. I am actually glowing. Right now.
Living it up, reducing my risk and yours. Up with a broom and a blow torch to eradicate all of this detritus from my evolution. I’m eager for everyone to see me in the authentic sound of Now. In the Instant. Every second spent in the Present. Fully, inarguably, simply alive.
No unintelligible drawers, no cascading shopping bags, no boxes in the back of the closet, no unfamiliar phone numbers in my pockets.
Just a little document like this one that sets all the other ones free.