Habit, routine. The momentum of habits. The momentum of personal routines. Territorial beings caught in the tidewater, the current rush, of mental and corporeal routines.
Endeavor then to perpetually initiate a kinetic and tangible shifting from static mental into the concrete physical, activity, actualizing, cutting through the currents, the tidewater, the slipstream; your mind is the rudder, your soul the propeller, or is it truly the moon and sun that controls these rhythms?
***
On a crowded afternoon, in the street, I cried out to whomever might listen, What language is spoken here? A man lying bleeding near the edge of a curb screamed, throat in tatters, Pisces!
***Why is dream imagery, i.e. internal emotional imagery derived from one's own subconscious, e.g. necessarily informed by a personal history and present cast of subjectively intimate nightmares, fantasies, abhorrencies, desires…why is this so crucial? Because the images, regardless of subliminal origin, come from your interior spaces, places deep within your hull where the ballast is your uh what we essentially like to call your souuuuuuuuuuul
Yesterday, couldn't get it done. Couldn't get writing done in the face of little personal necessary and domestic impediments. Had to walk the dog, that also for exercise, left work too late yesterday anyway, frankly, considering what time I had arrived. Then that damn old and compromised laptop takes so loooooooong to turn on, I'm not talking for online, I'm talking for ON, for typing purposes. I need a new computer, for explicit personal use, whatever. Yesterday upon home arrival, pent up in the head, I was. Head ablaze inside. I need to write fast. Big deal, this always happens, the feeling will fade, NO, need to let it not fade, need to not waver. Be a patient mental patient. Padded room, unwavering synapsoglossolalia. Fuck. Silly, with nothing to show for it today. Except, here. With some aplomb. That's something. Anyway, yesterday, really wanted to write, psyched self out of it. Waiting for slow PC, decided to empty dishwasher, opened a Coors Light bottle to accompany this task. Needed to be online because figured if do write will just do so in body of an email and send to self to work on later. Knew just the same would be any minute into suppertime domestic stuff. As happened directly. No big deal, drink another beer, and so on into the evening. Instead of writing, I took the bedroom A/C unit out and lugged it down to the basement as we are thankfully and luckily into the cool cool coooooool weather. While downstairs, took the opportunity to fire up the downstairs PC and at least move me MottC_salvaged_work file from gmail to desktop. Didn't go online too too long however as virus protection has expired and need to renew soon but don't want to charge it, nope. Hey man, I don't need your Internets, yeah, right, fuck it
Then I was 3-4 beers in and feeling not so apt to write. I could have used a cigarette but …NO MORE. Decided to read, which I figure to be just as important as writing at my stage of the game, by which I mean a stage foreshortened, reduced, retarded. No. NO. Anyway, I read "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" by Flannery O'Connor, then started "The River" by FO again, from Collected Stories. Good move. Got me thinking about "influences," the writers I've instinctively and habitually and always turned to over the last 12 – 15 years whose work has appealed to me as the way to do it. The list needs conscious expansion, but as it stands, includes: Hemingway. Steinbeck. Flannery O'Connor. Cormac McCarthy. Andre Dubus. Stephen King. John Irving. Raymond Carver. John Updike. Bukowski. Kafka. Faulkner…? I need to read more, more widely. MFA people must certainly laugh at me all day and night long up in they campuses and I don't care. I'm past the point of lying about shit. I'm way out of MFA range now and could never go back….would never go back….
***
Intelligence by which I mean the mental faculty involved in perceiving what is subjectively essential seemingly wanes and waxes like the lunar phases. This need not be so; unwavering persistence of attention equals mental toughness i.e. focus.
Rambling Blues you are my unequivocal self-preservative agent sub rosa….be all that you can be; muthafuckas, be your own deus ex machina
I remember it being said to me once by a creative writing instructor who shall remain unnamed because I'm kindly and cringingly embarrassed that earlier this year I actually sent him an email kind of sort of and obsequiously and toadyishly alerting him to Mott Cromby i.e. my weirdly still persistent writing activity, this back in March when I was all excited about that fable surrounding Jacob Beizart etc. buried back in this blog's archives. Impulsive move, ridiculous move, this note, this consideration, such is my intermittent and pathetic craving for some kind any kind of slim encouragement after many years of dogged and self-defeating writing behaviors; anyway I hope now somehow this jejune communiqué, this adolescent dispatch somehow mercifully eluded this dude's attention since it was an evidently (devoutly hoped) moldy university email address I sent it to, I think an old one yes or else I think the dude was on some kind of hiatus or academic sabbatical; regardless, and to the point: his line to me in terms of writing advice way back in Indiana days of yore was something akin to recognizing your weaknesses and turning them into strengths. Which to me, considering my case, must certainly mean subverting or subjugating or countermining or counteracting or refracting or recasting or reforging or in any event excogitating my obsessive compulsive proclivity toward anxiety nervosa neurosis into what? Sentences badly imitative of baaaaaaaad Jack Kerouacesqueatureizzleidolatry?????? Fuck it. I too was born in Lowell motherfuckin Massachusetts by the muddy banks of the Merrimack, a name believed to have been adopted by early European settlers from the Native America Merruasquamack, meaning swift water place.
what I mean to say of course is that Mott Cromby comes honestly by his self-predilection as a half-assed wannabe Beat progenitor. That's my story and I'm sticking by it
If I could hold on to just one thought
For long enough to know
Why my mind is moving so fast
And the conversation is slow.
Burn off all the fog
And let the sun through to the snow;
Let me see your face again
Before I have to go.
I have seen you in the movies
And in those magazines at night;
I saw you on the barstool when
You held that glass so tight.
And I saw you in my nightmares,
But I'll see you in my dreams.
And I might live a thousand years
Before I know what that means.
Once there was a friend of mine
Who died a thousand deaths;
His life was filled with parasites
And countless idle threats.
He trusted in a woman
And on her he made his bets;
Once there was a friend of mine
Who died a thousand deaths.
-- Neil Young, "Barstool Blues"
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