Post by Taylorholic78 on Jul 24, 2005 14:04:48 GMT -5
* from www.trusttheprocess.com
Throughout the course of 1998 John (the artist formerly known as Nigel) expressed many thoughts, opinions, ideas and insights (or just the ramblings of a madman to some!) through a feature on this website called The Nigel Page. We thought we would bring them all back for those who might have missed them.
January 1, 1998
All systems go. What a small world. Does it get harder to fill the page? One finds a flow as one did in English exams. Always could take a little knowledge and make it go a long way. Charmed the page so to speak. (Yawns) So, what's new? (Scans desk for inspiration: Finds none) The computer is back. Back from being down. Ahh, yes... I have been looking forward to this. And now that it is here I have to find ah... something to say.. That's me he smiled.. I've something to say.. "Really, my boy? Well step right up and tell us about it" I am a good man he said (And a good man is hard to find) "Yesss..." I whispered "Go on.." I have a unique perspective he said. I want to spread the word. "What word?" Drugs are bad. Money is bad. "Are you sure?" Well not really, I suppose in the right hands it could be useful. "In the right hands it is useful" I said. Yes. Yes. You are right. I am not fixed in my opinions.. and that is a good thing in todays' world. "It has always been a good thing, although sometimes it is hard to convince people. People like to be devout, one minded. It makes things simpler." I want to work. Although I want time for myself and my loved ones. "But what is it you have to say?" I don't always know. I cannot always turn on my philosophy like a tap. Give me time with someone and they will see the goodness in me. The energy, the experience... I have problems and I don't mind talking about them.. (Although G--- says I should only talk to her about them) "What else?" I know how to entertain people. Although I am shy. It is a struggle. (Picks his nose, puts the greasy booger in his mouth... his stomach rumbles) I know only how to be an artist. How to invent records, songs, musical shows. I can write a bit... People seem to like me. What should a philosopher have to say anyway? War is bad? War is stupid? Politicians are (mostly) liars? How many do I know? Can I speak from direct experience? Or a third generation hand me down of liberal hip? I love people. Especially children. They are open and honest, eager to learn. They remind me of me. Grown ups scare me. But I still love them. I have unlimited compassion but... sometimes I get frightened and act irrationally. There is no cure for love. Love is about control and energy. I like clothes. But I don't need them.. Not many anyway. Just one clean suit at all times of day. Nights I can get by naked. Bedclothes are what I need at night. Sheets and pillows and comforters..
Look. What I'm trying to say is this: I have nothing to say, nothing new to offer the people of this planet, but neither has anyone else.. so why not listen to me? Someone has to whisper sweet nothings in your ear. They are a comfort. I lurve you baby.... Daddy's gonnatake careof yew...Everything's gonna be all right... Just eat your wheaties... I am a lover. I am a teacher. A trainer. An amusement park caretaker. Only when I am afraid am I stupid. When I am afraid I hurt myself. I think that is true for everyone. And you know what? In almost all cases Fear is an illusion... Example: One man in Littletown USA rapes and kills three teen-aged girls over a period of a year (He is clinically insane) The authorities recognize a serial killer and the press begin to write about it. Within days everyone who has a teenage child in any-little-town USA is half scared out of their wits, and several days later, as the perpetrator has still not been found, just about everyone is staying indoors, taking greater care to lock up tightly at night etc. The man is found soon enough, but the meanness of his crimes is such that a legend grows. Someone writes a book based roughly on what happened (another a more obvious reportage paperback outsells it ten to one over the weeks of the man's being tried) The film rights are bought up and it so happens the director is a genius who turns the tale into a compelling highly entertaining scare piece that millions of people see.... Now we all know Truth is stranger thanfiction.. This monster existed.. and right now out there, there is probably another monster-in-training, warming up, ready to cook some female teenage limbs in a white wine sauce. By now the fear has been spread so far. This civilization we live in is so damn civilized, so damn safe... that any man that perpetrates an act of such meanness (and there are men like it, one or more a year in a country this size I imagine) becomes a legend and affects us all. That one man in several million begins a Fear process that can give us all nightmares, and cause us to all act irrationally.
Now: I rarely lock the doors to my car. I drive a BMW. A convertible. I don't own it.. it is on lease, but I am responsible for it. LA is hot. Oftentimes I take the roof down. I might stop on a street to pick up an ice cream, or a bagel, and I don't want to close the roof. It is a bother. And why should I? Afraid someone will take a cassette tape from off the front seat? A child's book off the backseat? A quarter from (what I call) the panhandler clip? They are welcome to it. Open the trunk and that pair of three year olds plastic wellies can be yours... in the time it takes to have the sprinkles put on my chocolate yogurt. But what about the phone? Horrors! I even leave the phone in place. Why? Well what good is it to you? You could use it for ten minutes.. before I report the loss and the system canceled. And for the sake of ten minutes of calls to your (at worse), cousin in Tasmania you now have a crime on your hands and the police are after you. They are not issuing wanted posters at every border control but you will not know that for sure. You are now a criminal. I don't tamper with open cars that don't belong to me. Fat or thin cars. Well I know I am not so desperate as some and I could one day find myself in a position say where I got lost in the desert for days and come across an open car on the roadside. On the front seat is a perspiring bottle of evian. I don't wait for the owner to return. I snatch that bottle and guzzle it down like my life depends on it. I am caught in the act. The owner returns (He has been out walking his pet rattlesnake) What does he do? Unless he is a monster (One in a million - maybe) he says: "my God.. let me help you. Here my locked trunk is full of evian water.. and potato chips too... help yourself. Let me give you a ride back to civilization. Get in (oh don't mind Monty.. he just ate) and you start to think just maybe is this guy for real or is he the snake skin murderer I read about days before I got lost in the desert and the fear process begins... Here is certain salvation and you say "Thanks" but I can walk from here. Thanks for the water. Or you don't cause this is the real world so you get in and he gives you a ride and maybe you have each made a new friend. In LA or London there is always someone who has had their car broken into, their mobile stolen and thousands of $$$ worth of calls racked up before they could cancel. Now maybe they live in fear of it happening again, and they infect others around them just by telling their story, who in turn pass it on like chinese whispers. Every day I try to make rational decisions about when to lock my car, when to close up the roof, when to put the phone in the glove box, but I make them on facts as I know them, not as I hear them.
(Returns with coffee having left his apartment door open - the room is as he left it as if to prove his point.) There was one birthday when I had sacks and sacks of mail. I was twenty two or three. Thousands upon thousands of birthday cards and greetings from people all over the free world. I could not open them all, could reply to barely a few and in fact found it hard not to appear disdainful towards the senders. Sacks of mailcloth filled my father's garage. Could I sit and spend time, acknowledge these gifts of greetings? Alas, no. For I was by now so full of my own importance I could not sit still for a minute. (The drugs had a hand in that also). Today I check my mail and I have nothing. Yesterday was no different. When I do get mail more often than not it is mail from either of my accountants, which I rarely open. What do I learn from this? There was a time when I was loved on a massive scale. Me! Some simple suburban kid from a simple catholic suburbia. Getting cards and letters from like souls all over. (Like the Rhinestone cowboy) I am so glad so grateful I had a moment of outreach. All corners. Not just me I appreciate, I was part of a team. A SWAT team of semi-professional teenage performers who made a difference for a minute or two. It's weird, but I want some time now to analyze what that meant... to me and to you. I don't want to be drunk.. retelling war stories in the boozer to some bleary bird like Georgie Best.. and I don't want to be traveling the same world with the same team, every year getting further from the pinups of yore. I have to find a new way. My Own way. A way that learns from the past but continues to grow, to appreciate. Clarity I suppose is what I'm after. And clarity unending must become nirvana. *(Kurt Cobain's death had a big effect on me. One he reminded me of my mortality and two his death brought to my attention just how far I had strayed off the path....)
I am thinking more now. Less of a free wheel. And I still make mistakes. So many mistakes I have made this year. Why so many? Because I have been taking risks, spreading out, taking up new challenges. Perhaps I am being foolish.. but those letters back in '83 were not a response to nothing. They responded to something that came out of a result of some risk taking. Some inner confidences that got together and grew and grew. Sometimes through osmosis sometimes by screaming and shouting. When I think of Duran's first manager Paul Berrow I think of a man with a vision. Confidence and belief. With the balls and the manners to sell us all, like he was selling a religion. But he was responding to a vision. And the vision was mine. And I will own that today and tomorrow and every last day of my life.
I still deserve a little outside stimuli once in a while. Caffeine I like in the morning and loud music. Like right now.. to get me to the next page I would like to play my favourite Wagner piece. It's from Gotterdammerung. It is a CD I have had for years and which has been lost up until recently. It is twenty odd minutes and the most perfect representation of Wagner's work I have found. Almost all I need in fact. There are other tracks on the CD, two or three I think, but I have not moved onto them yet, as I am still reveling in this first piece, so glad to have it back in my life, like a lost relation I cannot stop hugging it, holding it, smiling at it... For me it is a perfect expression of what man is capable of doing with music. For several seconds at different times throughout the piece the music is perfect, and it is as if the heavens open, and I catch a glance of utter peace. Want to cry but then I am whisked out of my memory (for this is where it takes me) and back to the present. But I am thankful all the same. One must be glad for even the slightest snatch of serenity in this world. Yesterday I was asked to list my favourite albums of the year. Almost all of them are listed because they have one or more moments of such serenity, such epic perfection. Metalheadz "Platinum Breakz" has such moments.. so does Mary J. Blige, and even the Bloodhound Gang. Moments I want to play over and over and over like some masturbatory delirium, until with such sadness I drag myself away and back into the present, so full of the problems that only the present knows. Yes. Music does that. It gets inside the soul at times, and wrestles with it, shows it a glimpse of the light and then backs away. (Who can keep an orgasm alive for more than a few seconds? No one. That is why there has to be foreplay, else life's pleasures would be far too fleeting.) And then we live in memory. In imitation of the moment. One of the few moments of absolute perfection that all of us are able to experience once in a while. And thank God. Because it is the glimpses that keep us hanging on, believing in there being some sense to our experience, to our existence. This CD is dying. It skips occasionally, thankfully not yet at the magic moments, but it threatens.. and one day it will be gone. I should say that this CD, this particular performance has been impossible for me to find. I have even lost the cover. What I know about it is not much. One day it will be gone, and I will have to live only with memory. I will listen to other versions of the same piece. Perhaps I will meet one that comes close to stirring in me the same emotion, but i doubt it. And that's OK. Because life goes on and I am just so grateful that I was able to experience that moment just then the way that I did. And if I never do again then that's hard cheddar. I shall miss you but thank you for being there at all. Am I repeating myself? I have made my point. (Pauses after taking a lengthy phone call) I could now call attention to my sore throat. Or "The Wagnerian influence on film music" or how I'm beginning to think about breakfast. A lot. I have been up since six thirty. And not yet eaten. Keeping my options open. (I have been told not to eat before I work out) But I did not go to the gym or run on the beach. I just kept ploughing on into my three pages, wanting to see just how much writing is required to fill these "three pages" daily. I should explain: Three morning pages is a concept I gleaned from "The Artist's Way". A self help manual for finding your creative self. Really the only thing I have gotten from it is this idea of producing three written pages daily.. written in the morning, whatever the weather, however one is feeling, whatever else one has on, just to make the time to write, on a daily basis, until it becomes habit and Shazam! One has become
A WRITER.
Hmm. Sounds easy enough? Well let me tell you that sitting here since six thirty (It is now Ten minutes to eleven) is not easy. Plumbing one's own depths in the hope that one will come up with a single valid sentence; Perhaps one paragraph of original perception or a decent ride, at least. A joke or a little humoring irony perhaps. Possibly I can learn something about myself; although that something will never be I am not a writer.... because I am writing. Nobody can deny me that. I may not be a good writer but one other thing is for sure: Practice makes possible. I am running out of fuel. Perhaps if I eat, the remaining lines can still be written with gusto. (Remember, this is a discipline. I have to finish Three pages by midday) otherwise the process will get slower and slower and possibly desperation will start to creep in, and I might avoid going off on what could be fascinating tangents. My back hurts and I am itching to get up, walk about my room, eat. (Gets up and prepares a meal of oats and a banana.)
Sometimes home reminds me of home . Lately I notice it is sounds that prick my memory. The recent rains brought a torrent of sonic recollections. Cars being driven through rain, rain falling on the roof, footsteps in the rain... All sound changes around rain. Today it is dry and bright. The sound of a slow prop plane has a familiar hazy ring, or a distant jet airliner. The sky doesn't change much from continent to continent... this could be a very pretty English sky, as could the slight breeze be a pretty slight English breeze. Thank god countries don't have dominion over the weather. You cannot keep a cloud out with a checkpoint, not seize a raindrop if it has forgotten or lost its passport. If there were a way it would be done. I myself have reached a checkpoint of sorts. I am drained of ideas. This process has lost its pleasure... but I will go on. I must. It is important that I delve into myself in this way because only then will I find some kind of answer to the question I put to myself at the top of the first page. Remember? It was something along the lines of "What do you have to say?, What do you have to offer that is so unique? So interesting... so important that it deserves to be shouted from the rooftops." (Or at least with the backing of a major label) To be honest I am not sure if I have answered my own query, but I have attained some small satisfaction from sitting down to do a job of sorts and not getting up until it's finished. My homework if you like.. What I would like now for my pains is a back rub, or some sort of relaxing massage. Perhaps I will call my favourite massage therapist... although I doubt it. A tad too indulgent for today methinks. And so this relationship with you, dear reader, must draw to a close. You have been so kind, to lend me your attention as I search my soul for relevance, for guidance. And perhaps these words are best meant only for you, you who offers me love unconditionally, today.... or perhaps they could serve another purpose, in some edited form perhaps? ... A mission statement of who I am, what I do... I doubt it though, and it is certainly not necessary. I shall not expect to see it published then, even though I would like to publish something.... one day. If I can maintain this kind of involvement with language for some time, I am sure to yield something of importance, am I not?
Sincerely, Nigel.
Throughout the course of 1998 John (the artist formerly known as Nigel) expressed many thoughts, opinions, ideas and insights (or just the ramblings of a madman to some!) through a feature on this website called The Nigel Page. We thought we would bring them all back for those who might have missed them.
January 1, 1998
All systems go. What a small world. Does it get harder to fill the page? One finds a flow as one did in English exams. Always could take a little knowledge and make it go a long way. Charmed the page so to speak. (Yawns) So, what's new? (Scans desk for inspiration: Finds none) The computer is back. Back from being down. Ahh, yes... I have been looking forward to this. And now that it is here I have to find ah... something to say.. That's me he smiled.. I've something to say.. "Really, my boy? Well step right up and tell us about it" I am a good man he said (And a good man is hard to find) "Yesss..." I whispered "Go on.." I have a unique perspective he said. I want to spread the word. "What word?" Drugs are bad. Money is bad. "Are you sure?" Well not really, I suppose in the right hands it could be useful. "In the right hands it is useful" I said. Yes. Yes. You are right. I am not fixed in my opinions.. and that is a good thing in todays' world. "It has always been a good thing, although sometimes it is hard to convince people. People like to be devout, one minded. It makes things simpler." I want to work. Although I want time for myself and my loved ones. "But what is it you have to say?" I don't always know. I cannot always turn on my philosophy like a tap. Give me time with someone and they will see the goodness in me. The energy, the experience... I have problems and I don't mind talking about them.. (Although G--- says I should only talk to her about them) "What else?" I know how to entertain people. Although I am shy. It is a struggle. (Picks his nose, puts the greasy booger in his mouth... his stomach rumbles) I know only how to be an artist. How to invent records, songs, musical shows. I can write a bit... People seem to like me. What should a philosopher have to say anyway? War is bad? War is stupid? Politicians are (mostly) liars? How many do I know? Can I speak from direct experience? Or a third generation hand me down of liberal hip? I love people. Especially children. They are open and honest, eager to learn. They remind me of me. Grown ups scare me. But I still love them. I have unlimited compassion but... sometimes I get frightened and act irrationally. There is no cure for love. Love is about control and energy. I like clothes. But I don't need them.. Not many anyway. Just one clean suit at all times of day. Nights I can get by naked. Bedclothes are what I need at night. Sheets and pillows and comforters..
Look. What I'm trying to say is this: I have nothing to say, nothing new to offer the people of this planet, but neither has anyone else.. so why not listen to me? Someone has to whisper sweet nothings in your ear. They are a comfort. I lurve you baby.... Daddy's gonnatake careof yew...Everything's gonna be all right... Just eat your wheaties... I am a lover. I am a teacher. A trainer. An amusement park caretaker. Only when I am afraid am I stupid. When I am afraid I hurt myself. I think that is true for everyone. And you know what? In almost all cases Fear is an illusion... Example: One man in Littletown USA rapes and kills three teen-aged girls over a period of a year (He is clinically insane) The authorities recognize a serial killer and the press begin to write about it. Within days everyone who has a teenage child in any-little-town USA is half scared out of their wits, and several days later, as the perpetrator has still not been found, just about everyone is staying indoors, taking greater care to lock up tightly at night etc. The man is found soon enough, but the meanness of his crimes is such that a legend grows. Someone writes a book based roughly on what happened (another a more obvious reportage paperback outsells it ten to one over the weeks of the man's being tried) The film rights are bought up and it so happens the director is a genius who turns the tale into a compelling highly entertaining scare piece that millions of people see.... Now we all know Truth is stranger thanfiction.. This monster existed.. and right now out there, there is probably another monster-in-training, warming up, ready to cook some female teenage limbs in a white wine sauce. By now the fear has been spread so far. This civilization we live in is so damn civilized, so damn safe... that any man that perpetrates an act of such meanness (and there are men like it, one or more a year in a country this size I imagine) becomes a legend and affects us all. That one man in several million begins a Fear process that can give us all nightmares, and cause us to all act irrationally.
Now: I rarely lock the doors to my car. I drive a BMW. A convertible. I don't own it.. it is on lease, but I am responsible for it. LA is hot. Oftentimes I take the roof down. I might stop on a street to pick up an ice cream, or a bagel, and I don't want to close the roof. It is a bother. And why should I? Afraid someone will take a cassette tape from off the front seat? A child's book off the backseat? A quarter from (what I call) the panhandler clip? They are welcome to it. Open the trunk and that pair of three year olds plastic wellies can be yours... in the time it takes to have the sprinkles put on my chocolate yogurt. But what about the phone? Horrors! I even leave the phone in place. Why? Well what good is it to you? You could use it for ten minutes.. before I report the loss and the system canceled. And for the sake of ten minutes of calls to your (at worse), cousin in Tasmania you now have a crime on your hands and the police are after you. They are not issuing wanted posters at every border control but you will not know that for sure. You are now a criminal. I don't tamper with open cars that don't belong to me. Fat or thin cars. Well I know I am not so desperate as some and I could one day find myself in a position say where I got lost in the desert for days and come across an open car on the roadside. On the front seat is a perspiring bottle of evian. I don't wait for the owner to return. I snatch that bottle and guzzle it down like my life depends on it. I am caught in the act. The owner returns (He has been out walking his pet rattlesnake) What does he do? Unless he is a monster (One in a million - maybe) he says: "my God.. let me help you. Here my locked trunk is full of evian water.. and potato chips too... help yourself. Let me give you a ride back to civilization. Get in (oh don't mind Monty.. he just ate) and you start to think just maybe is this guy for real or is he the snake skin murderer I read about days before I got lost in the desert and the fear process begins... Here is certain salvation and you say "Thanks" but I can walk from here. Thanks for the water. Or you don't cause this is the real world so you get in and he gives you a ride and maybe you have each made a new friend. In LA or London there is always someone who has had their car broken into, their mobile stolen and thousands of $$$ worth of calls racked up before they could cancel. Now maybe they live in fear of it happening again, and they infect others around them just by telling their story, who in turn pass it on like chinese whispers. Every day I try to make rational decisions about when to lock my car, when to close up the roof, when to put the phone in the glove box, but I make them on facts as I know them, not as I hear them.
(Returns with coffee having left his apartment door open - the room is as he left it as if to prove his point.) There was one birthday when I had sacks and sacks of mail. I was twenty two or three. Thousands upon thousands of birthday cards and greetings from people all over the free world. I could not open them all, could reply to barely a few and in fact found it hard not to appear disdainful towards the senders. Sacks of mailcloth filled my father's garage. Could I sit and spend time, acknowledge these gifts of greetings? Alas, no. For I was by now so full of my own importance I could not sit still for a minute. (The drugs had a hand in that also). Today I check my mail and I have nothing. Yesterday was no different. When I do get mail more often than not it is mail from either of my accountants, which I rarely open. What do I learn from this? There was a time when I was loved on a massive scale. Me! Some simple suburban kid from a simple catholic suburbia. Getting cards and letters from like souls all over. (Like the Rhinestone cowboy) I am so glad so grateful I had a moment of outreach. All corners. Not just me I appreciate, I was part of a team. A SWAT team of semi-professional teenage performers who made a difference for a minute or two. It's weird, but I want some time now to analyze what that meant... to me and to you. I don't want to be drunk.. retelling war stories in the boozer to some bleary bird like Georgie Best.. and I don't want to be traveling the same world with the same team, every year getting further from the pinups of yore. I have to find a new way. My Own way. A way that learns from the past but continues to grow, to appreciate. Clarity I suppose is what I'm after. And clarity unending must become nirvana. *(Kurt Cobain's death had a big effect on me. One he reminded me of my mortality and two his death brought to my attention just how far I had strayed off the path....)
I am thinking more now. Less of a free wheel. And I still make mistakes. So many mistakes I have made this year. Why so many? Because I have been taking risks, spreading out, taking up new challenges. Perhaps I am being foolish.. but those letters back in '83 were not a response to nothing. They responded to something that came out of a result of some risk taking. Some inner confidences that got together and grew and grew. Sometimes through osmosis sometimes by screaming and shouting. When I think of Duran's first manager Paul Berrow I think of a man with a vision. Confidence and belief. With the balls and the manners to sell us all, like he was selling a religion. But he was responding to a vision. And the vision was mine. And I will own that today and tomorrow and every last day of my life.
I still deserve a little outside stimuli once in a while. Caffeine I like in the morning and loud music. Like right now.. to get me to the next page I would like to play my favourite Wagner piece. It's from Gotterdammerung. It is a CD I have had for years and which has been lost up until recently. It is twenty odd minutes and the most perfect representation of Wagner's work I have found. Almost all I need in fact. There are other tracks on the CD, two or three I think, but I have not moved onto them yet, as I am still reveling in this first piece, so glad to have it back in my life, like a lost relation I cannot stop hugging it, holding it, smiling at it... For me it is a perfect expression of what man is capable of doing with music. For several seconds at different times throughout the piece the music is perfect, and it is as if the heavens open, and I catch a glance of utter peace. Want to cry but then I am whisked out of my memory (for this is where it takes me) and back to the present. But I am thankful all the same. One must be glad for even the slightest snatch of serenity in this world. Yesterday I was asked to list my favourite albums of the year. Almost all of them are listed because they have one or more moments of such serenity, such epic perfection. Metalheadz "Platinum Breakz" has such moments.. so does Mary J. Blige, and even the Bloodhound Gang. Moments I want to play over and over and over like some masturbatory delirium, until with such sadness I drag myself away and back into the present, so full of the problems that only the present knows. Yes. Music does that. It gets inside the soul at times, and wrestles with it, shows it a glimpse of the light and then backs away. (Who can keep an orgasm alive for more than a few seconds? No one. That is why there has to be foreplay, else life's pleasures would be far too fleeting.) And then we live in memory. In imitation of the moment. One of the few moments of absolute perfection that all of us are able to experience once in a while. And thank God. Because it is the glimpses that keep us hanging on, believing in there being some sense to our experience, to our existence. This CD is dying. It skips occasionally, thankfully not yet at the magic moments, but it threatens.. and one day it will be gone. I should say that this CD, this particular performance has been impossible for me to find. I have even lost the cover. What I know about it is not much. One day it will be gone, and I will have to live only with memory. I will listen to other versions of the same piece. Perhaps I will meet one that comes close to stirring in me the same emotion, but i doubt it. And that's OK. Because life goes on and I am just so grateful that I was able to experience that moment just then the way that I did. And if I never do again then that's hard cheddar. I shall miss you but thank you for being there at all. Am I repeating myself? I have made my point. (Pauses after taking a lengthy phone call) I could now call attention to my sore throat. Or "The Wagnerian influence on film music" or how I'm beginning to think about breakfast. A lot. I have been up since six thirty. And not yet eaten. Keeping my options open. (I have been told not to eat before I work out) But I did not go to the gym or run on the beach. I just kept ploughing on into my three pages, wanting to see just how much writing is required to fill these "three pages" daily. I should explain: Three morning pages is a concept I gleaned from "The Artist's Way". A self help manual for finding your creative self. Really the only thing I have gotten from it is this idea of producing three written pages daily.. written in the morning, whatever the weather, however one is feeling, whatever else one has on, just to make the time to write, on a daily basis, until it becomes habit and Shazam! One has become
A WRITER.
Hmm. Sounds easy enough? Well let me tell you that sitting here since six thirty (It is now Ten minutes to eleven) is not easy. Plumbing one's own depths in the hope that one will come up with a single valid sentence; Perhaps one paragraph of original perception or a decent ride, at least. A joke or a little humoring irony perhaps. Possibly I can learn something about myself; although that something will never be I am not a writer.... because I am writing. Nobody can deny me that. I may not be a good writer but one other thing is for sure: Practice makes possible. I am running out of fuel. Perhaps if I eat, the remaining lines can still be written with gusto. (Remember, this is a discipline. I have to finish Three pages by midday) otherwise the process will get slower and slower and possibly desperation will start to creep in, and I might avoid going off on what could be fascinating tangents. My back hurts and I am itching to get up, walk about my room, eat. (Gets up and prepares a meal of oats and a banana.)
Sometimes home reminds me of home . Lately I notice it is sounds that prick my memory. The recent rains brought a torrent of sonic recollections. Cars being driven through rain, rain falling on the roof, footsteps in the rain... All sound changes around rain. Today it is dry and bright. The sound of a slow prop plane has a familiar hazy ring, or a distant jet airliner. The sky doesn't change much from continent to continent... this could be a very pretty English sky, as could the slight breeze be a pretty slight English breeze. Thank god countries don't have dominion over the weather. You cannot keep a cloud out with a checkpoint, not seize a raindrop if it has forgotten or lost its passport. If there were a way it would be done. I myself have reached a checkpoint of sorts. I am drained of ideas. This process has lost its pleasure... but I will go on. I must. It is important that I delve into myself in this way because only then will I find some kind of answer to the question I put to myself at the top of the first page. Remember? It was something along the lines of "What do you have to say?, What do you have to offer that is so unique? So interesting... so important that it deserves to be shouted from the rooftops." (Or at least with the backing of a major label) To be honest I am not sure if I have answered my own query, but I have attained some small satisfaction from sitting down to do a job of sorts and not getting up until it's finished. My homework if you like.. What I would like now for my pains is a back rub, or some sort of relaxing massage. Perhaps I will call my favourite massage therapist... although I doubt it. A tad too indulgent for today methinks. And so this relationship with you, dear reader, must draw to a close. You have been so kind, to lend me your attention as I search my soul for relevance, for guidance. And perhaps these words are best meant only for you, you who offers me love unconditionally, today.... or perhaps they could serve another purpose, in some edited form perhaps? ... A mission statement of who I am, what I do... I doubt it though, and it is certainly not necessary. I shall not expect to see it published then, even though I would like to publish something.... one day. If I can maintain this kind of involvement with language for some time, I am sure to yield something of importance, am I not?
Sincerely, Nigel.
