Wednesday, February 06, 2008

ten minutes to midnight again

I have to work quickly because I've done it again - given myself only ten minutes to get my post in for the day. Stream of consciousness again. But with punctuation and stuff. Super Tuesday exhausted me, watching all of that coverage and poring over all the blogs and toggling back and forth between this web page and that for results and analysis. Hopes rising and falling and rising and flattening out and rising etcetera etcetera. Today I've been doing the same thing but on a much smaller scale - reading blogs and slogs and comment sections and you know what? I have got to stop. I'm just jerking myself around here. My head is spinning. Egg. Zausted.

I find the hostile back and forth between Obama and Hillary supporters to be really depressing. We should be delighted that we have two dynamic candidates like these cats. I don't want to dip into all that bickering any more. It's not illuminating, it's just confusing.

Reading more Dreams from My Father today. Goddamn, he's a good writer. Beyond that, there's something in him that I find seriously galvanizing, and not just politically galvanizing; I feel spurred on to make the most of myself, just as a person here on Earth. He makes me want to figure out what I'm doing here. He's a great writer - great writers do this to me. I don't mean to say that they all have the same precise effect but they all make me live differently while I'm under their spell. Tolstoy, he turns me into a magnifying glass. Nuances apppear everywhere in all their specific splendor. Who else, which other writers do what...ah, hell, it's late. I don't know. Other writers do other things. I forget everybody. But Barack Obama's writing - particularly this book - makes me want to turn myself inside out and find who the person of substance is in there. It makes me want to take myself seriously.

I read for a while this afternoon and then I leaped up and ran to the computer to work on this piece that's trying to come out of me. I could feel the essence of the question I'm wrestling with. I can't tell you what it is because it's not tellable. Even if I had the words, I think it's a case of to tell it is to kill it. It's just a lump of living clay in my gut, rumbling around, feeling significant. I did some writing and tried to burrow into it. I tried to run headfirst into the scariest part. It sort of worked. I got scared, at least. I mean in a good way. I wrote and what I wrote frightened me a bit, until I fell asleep again. Not asleep asleep. Just the regular awake asleep we all hang around in most days.

I will now do you all a favor and go to actual sleep. These rambler posts. Lordy.

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