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Showing posts from March, 2005
I bask in equatorial haze... I made it down to Grand Isle, an island at the far southeastern tip of Louisiana, where I am typing and looking out over the ocean. I had planned to stay another night, but beyond fishing, drinking, and eating fish there isn't anything to do here, and my hotel afforded no view and was a poorish value at almost 7o dollars a night. So I shall head north, listening to the new Beck album (which is so good, I played it straight through almost three times last night; when I am feeling a bit more literal, I will try to describe the feeling I got when I first put it on, looking at distant, evocative clouds hanging over the Louisiana forests, rolling through the bayou towns on backroads at sunset - it was deeply profound.) I think I'll do some camping tonight, though the Weather Channel has called for a chance of severe weather. My story is up to almost 21,000 words and shows no sign of stopping (my next longest, "Watersmeet" clocks in at a mere
Greetings from Ville Platte, LA... Where it's 76 degrees and feels hotter. I've been backpacking the last three days - alone! - and just got out of the woods this morning. I smell like I've been backpacking for three days, so me thinks I'll get a hotel room tonight (somewhere on the coast) shower, eat a pizza, and write until little pieces of bone are sticking through my fingertips. The muse is singing a big, loud song in me, and I'll do my best to dictate what she is saying. I spent Friday night in a motel room in Canton, Mississippi (just north of Jackson) and Sunday night in a rental cabin in St. Landry, Louisiana (five bonus points if you can find that on a map). To say the cabin was rustic is the understatement of the year. To say the people who own it are hill folk is also a great understatement. But, though the cabin was dilapidated, it was clean, and I wrote a LOT and slept almost ten hours, and the folks who owned it were very kind and absolutely fascinated
"Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow. Solitude is the ally of sorrow as well as a companion of spiritual exaltation." Kahlil Gibran. That quote moved me profoundly today. I've not slept well, nor have I been able to rise above the pall that has descended over me in previous days. I think that my sickness, coupled with anxiety over my upcoming trip, has led my mind down dark avenues. I am looking forward to the trip (I need a change, a breaking of the routine that has sustained me for so long) but it's hard, when shivering alone at four in the morning, to look ahead with anything but apprehension. It would be so easy for me to surround myself with friends right now, but I feel, as strongly as I've ever felt anything, that my path is one of solitude, and I need to walk it in silence. Though I've not lost myself, there are parts of me that are burgeoning, and I want to see what comes about. The
In frigid purgatorial fires... Tomorrow I leave for the Gulf Coast - I've got a massive story to finish, so I'll spend at least a few nights in cheap motels. I want to find my Indian name, but that may be hard since I'll neither fast nor smoke peyote. Perhaps I'll just hold my breath until a vision comes. I'm sick but on the mend. Heather and I declared a new holiday yesterday: Suck Day, the worst day ever (we both have the plague or something). But the writing meeting brought us out of our torpor. Chris wrote a very different, very huge story for this week, and Adam wrote the best thing he's ever written. And then I went home and shook through the night, reading Heather's poetry, and found one that's so brilliant I couldn't sleep. (I also drank a cup of coffee at ten, so that might have had something to do with it.) There's certainly stagnation - I keep saying it's been January every day since November - but there's the sense of
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