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A long time ago, I was part of a group who took jobs to live so they could pursue their art – I had dreams of being a writer. California tried to destroy my dreams by making work and the great material machine godlike. Luckily, I escaped back to my homeland, New Orleans, but as luck would have it in reaching for the brass ring, the terra firma sank underwater – which became a big cosmic joke and created a domino effect that derailed my five-year plan.

Here we are seven years later, and I can’t even recall my five-year plan, much less my one-year plan or my twenty-year plan. Let’s just say there are no plans now, except to get myself on track. But I find now that I am finding myself again, some familiar traits are coming to the fore, only now they seem amped as if they had been doping a lá Lance Armstrong – I mean my intolerance is heightened, my desire for freedom is unquenched – so how to move forward and not “sabotage your life” as a friend of mine recently wrote.

If you are a girl on fire, and that flame has been dimmed, how do you nurture the fire without burning up?

When Bukowski was 49 years old a publisher told him he would pay him $100 a month for the rest of his life if he would quit his job at the post office and write. He did that and 15 years later he wrote a thank you note to John Martin – here is an excerpt:

So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I’m gone) how I’ve come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die.

To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

Reading this letter gives me great hope.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012 at 9:19 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.