I suspect I’ve got about 21 minutes of coherence left today–in retrospect, I’m beginning to think I might have devoted some of this break to scripted recreation–so let’s jump right in.
Right now I’m sure I cut a figure something akin to “Homeless Man #2″ on Homicide: Life on the Streets. In an effort to be kind to my skull I haven’t shaved in a few days, and I’ve gone relatively sleepless for the past three or four nights for reasons I can’t quite fathom. (I’m thinking of dredging up a vintage concert tee to complete the “just shambled from the shelter” look; maybe I’ll add a feather boa while I’m at it.) The good news is that (piles of grading aside) I’m nearly caught up with most of my work; that’s doubly delightful since I abandoned my slow, stately death march on Tuesday in order to get some poetry submissions out into circulation. I originally approached that task with modest expectations, hoping to finish off one set and prepare it for mailing by week’s end. Instead I went all loco, tattooed myself with toner, and got every last bit in the mail by Thursday afternoon.
The upshot of this seizure of freakish productivity is a curious form of collateral disinhibition: all the barriers I usually throw up to deal with the world are more permeable than usual, and incoming and outgoing impulses are not getting filtered quite as well as they would normally be. I’m pretty sure that this is a consequence of poetic immersion–I aspire to be fairly ruthless when I’m revising old work, and being so requires more candor and transparency than I’m used to–but in any case it disqualifies me from entering polite company, at least for the time being. That probably sounds a little pathological, even if evidence suggests that I can still bite my tongue long enough to let the lady in front of me at the grocery store pay by check and (with a perversity that might otherwise amuse me) count out exact change so that she doesn’t have to manage all those messy decimals when she balances her checkbook. Under normal circumstances I approach such situations as opportunities to exercise patience; I might wait behind her even if another register was open. Today, however, my tongue is a little bit sharper, my reactions a little more raw, my desires a little more pressing. It’s a mighty fine condition for writing, but perhaps not for pleasantries, civilities, or shopping.
I’ll confess to having a large and rambunctious devil inside, but when he’s sheared through several sheets of skin, I think it’s best to hunker down and ride it out. In fact, I’m probably going to have to sift through everything I’ve written during the past several days to make sure I haven’t committed anything untoward to pixels or paper.
Poetry aside, the last thing the world needs is honesty from me.
