post 20 july

justwrite 20 july

let’s take that challenge embrace the ballast and then let it go there’s the flow I showed light on and to yesterday it’s true and sometimes those half-ideas ought to be seized and shaken maybe not baken but at least stirred vigorously to see what comes to the top or drops out mid-spin and the whim I mentioned yesterday could easily be here to stay but it means dropping all sounds and floundering with meaning as we’ll soon be seeing okay well let’s say that I’m sitting on a bench in a park and it’s twilightish or almost but definitely after dinner and about some yards to the right and facing me across a sidewalk or at least facing opposite from the way I’m facing there’s a young couple they are maybe just in the middle of college or here I would say university because it’s not the same thing but he is whispering and I am thinking he should speak up because that would be more entertaining and suddenly he is speaking more loudly and the things he is saying are fairly personal in nature and when she realizes that everyone can hear him she blushes with embarrassment but she looks cute when she blushes so she also twinkles her eye a little and this encourages him anyway plus she has dimples I realize oh you have dimples! he says and she looks around to see who has noticed and presses her palms to her cheeks to hide the offending marks but of course they are not offensive and secretly she is proud and almost tells him so but then her mouth is opening anyway secretly I am proud of my dimples she says and I giggle a little because it’s so easy to be an author but then they both look in my direction because really I’m the only one around and there’s an astounding lack of other people at this point they seem to have all gone away and suddenly I’m feeling quite awkward and I think it’d be better if they stop looking at me and focus on each other there’s only so much time of course there’s only so much time he says staring into her eyes of course she says and takes down her hands from her face and takes his hands in hers which is nice she has the power even if I don’t have any hot water and really someone should do something about this it’s not these two and even though I don’t script it they kiss anyway which is what happens when you find out there’s only so much time

justwrite 19 july

while I was going to sleep last night not that I was falling asleep but while I was creeping toward creeping to sleep I had heaped up two cups of coffee in a non-doing day and there was no way I was sleeping yet but I was getting ready to go there just in case the chance should occur but I had an idea and it was something to write about not to write home about for there were some doubts in the formula I’m forewarning you but it’s true that I thought it was worth remembering and I pretended to have the energy to write it down to pick myself up and also my pen and invest this idea under the list of the day’s events carefully spent in black ink and before the hopefully more fascinatingly green ink tall cool drink of dreams ready to be streamed straight through but instead you know the truth because it had been a hot day and there had been no way I would actually prop myself and write something legible once you turn on the light there’s no fight left in you you’ve just given up and I’m not ready to make that declaration even if I know that when I get up there will be no hot water and I will miss the right bus or I will get there too early to do anything about it anyway we doubt it will ever be time to sleep on those kinds of nights and so I left off the light and tried to make it into a catchy sort of something I could remember and I stuck in the park bench as a device so that in the next day’s bright spotlight of recollection I would fetch in a memory and here is what it would be a couple on a park bench and me sitting nearby on another bench and in this story I am the author and in this picture I do the painting and I had a line ready for saying but beyond the bench and the characters I am left bereft of the jist which I can’t say will really go missed in the history of literary theories bleary from blurring into metafiction and maybe was it watching the emma Thompson movie would I put myself in that place would I trace a character’s life in my own pencil line and what would I find to say to those people hello yes I would make bets with them that they would do something ridiculous and of course they would because I would be making them do it and they would whisper to each other behind closed hands but of course I would have to write their lines and of course they’d find they couldn’t escape and how would they react it’d be more like a thought experiment maybe a series maybe a bunch of shorts flashfictionish with the same conceit each time and yes it’s conceited to find yourself in the middle of your own story but that’s what happens in life too of course