The Year So Far
Five months into it. Stats. One is the close to half-a-million cigarettes I’ve smoked or allowed to smolder producing second-hand smoke. Another. That’s 28,105, the approximate number of days I’ve lived. Yeah, just another day here, vaguely recalling the history of the one before yesterday when troops landed on the western coast of France to stop the Nazi onslaught.
Just another day of thousands of just another days. It is life. It is now. Quantified as a stat, no matter how ridiculous that is, seeing now not as a point in a measurement sequence but as nothing more and everything more than living, not so quantifiable and far more important.
How have I spent today’s remembered hours? A late start, up at two this afternoon. A short chat with Sandi full of try-to’s including some writing, some podcast research on composer John Barry. Podcasts — like starting a garden of delicious radishes on a five-by-five plot at the edge of a town, population thirty-five, many of whom are aurally illiterate. But, lucky me, I derive a satisfaction from the learning, writing, and hearing myself talk, that and enjoying the music I include in each broadcast.
As to story writing. Junction is ever-present, with new variations of the place floating into view each day. Lots of reference to jazz from different sources have come into my experience this last week. Giving that consideration, how to incorporate it into a story. I realized that jazz is not just another category of note-fed style; it’s a way to, no a process of, producing an new understanding of the universe of . . . well, just the universe. How to incorporate this notion into a character’s action, let alone a plot, this is my goal. Help! Ha. No help out there that I’ve found. It’s all to personal, originating with me, just off-beat to where extra-personal identification is not possible, aside from shreds of shared experience that, if pursued, would lead to the wrong town, away from my Junction, toward someone’s home place where their memories live. I’d be uncomfortable there, all the while confused as I would try to relate the sites to my own images. Sure, there’s a story there, too, but it’s someone else’s. Enjoy your thoughts, but they aren’t mine. So no help there.
