*Um…I was in bed, and when I got up to write this, I intended it to be about the music I was listening to and the books I was reading during the period of my life I discuss below. It’s not. It’s something else. By the time I thought to bring my original subject in, I didn’t feel comfortable inserting it. I didn’t want to write the personal essay version of a colonoscopy. I’m just feeling too gosh darned fine this morning.
I’ve talked and written about the spring and summer of 2001 a lot. When I do I may come off as sounding like someone reflecting on the glory days, those of wine and roses. For a lot of people “those days” tend to be centered around partying, or for the more fortunate, a summer in Europe or something of that ilk. I don’t mean to put myself above those people that glowingly reminisce on such days; I spent a few weeks in Europe in 2002 and the spring and summer of 2000 are a time I get nostalgic for as a period of great parties and such.
The spring and summer of ’01(or the Easter Seals Days, as I’ll call them), as you may already know, are special to me for several reasons, and while some partying was always involved (as it was at any time up until I was 25 or 26), it’s a chapter (or book) of my life I hold dear because of the vastness of the richness of my experiences. I’d stumbled into a job, a young aspiring writer, that was ripe with stories, and centered on kids with autism, which itself held enormous implications as a health, educational and social issue. I was exploring the city more than I had, continuing that particular aspect of my life from the previous summer, and aside from spending time with my own friends I made some quick but fond acquaintances of a few people my best friend Joey knew, as well as many people I worked with. Creatively I was more prolific than any other time in my life up to the present day, in both writing and reading. I was falling into a solid philosophy, the only time that’s ever happened. (I’ve since found that abiding one single philosophy is not the way to go-that’s just my view-although I still believe in the essentials of my thinking, which can be found in and better explained by some of the works of Henry Miller, The Tao Te Ching and other Eastern texts, and even in portions of Christianity [and the other major religions.])
And then, of course, there was Sept. 11th, not an insignificant event in anyone’s life. As mentioned elsewhere, while keeping my usual journal, I realized less than a month into my job at Easter Seals that I was writing the framework for a novel, and since I took that job only until I was to leave for Normal, IL in the fall, I’d known the ending all along: I’d say goodbye to the kids, city, etc., and move to the sticks. I still maintain that my post-9/11 trauma was made all the more intense by the fact that I was living out a self-predestined period of my life, an illusion stronger than most that was destroyed by the attacks. Then I had what would come to be known as a 9/11 novel.
Of course, my journal from the Easter Seals Days is lost. Three years ago I won a writing contest through my community college, and went to another school one evening to possibly win a regional award, though I only wound up doing a reading in front of 100 people or so-a pretty big accomplishment in itself. Afterward I had my ride drop me off at the liquor store near my house. I got beer and took a cab home, leaving a binder full of my stuff-including about 200 pages of the Easter Seals journal (my novel, essentially) in the taxi, and never recovered it, despite my best, desperate efforts.
Luckily I still have a stack of index cards, which I began using during that time to help break my writer’s block (it worked), and yesterday I discovered I translated a few pages of the old journal into another notebook. It’s only a fraction, but, like the index cards, the numerous written attempts at opening the novel, and all the fliers and memos I saved from the school, I have points to work from.
I’m pretty sure that the novel I had planned for years will not materialize in anything near the form I’d long thought it would. It may end up being a series of short stories (I have already written a bunch over the years), and maybe in addition, I’m thinking this morning, I will write a novel based on my time at Easter Seals, but far less autobiographical than I’d planned. Not long ago I realized that, barring some surprise of creativity or inspiration (combined with discipline, which I’m lacking), I’m not going to be the novelist I always wished I would be, at least not for awhile. I know, plenty of novelists didn’t write their first books until they were in their 40’s or 50’s, so maybe that’s when I’ll come around. That’s the type I’m destined to be, possibly.
For the time being, I need to focus on keeping a grip and establishing some stability in my life, and continue with short stories, poetry, short essays, etc. I’ve got to be satisfied with and sometimes even proud of who I am, as a writer and as a human being, rather than pouting about how I haven’t come even close to what I expected with the written word, or loathing myself for disappointing my own expectations of the person I’d be socially, emotionally, and intellectually. It’s a grand revelation, I tell you, and still in tune with my basic philosophy.
As Henry Miller wrote: “I am a man. That seems to me sufficient.”
THE PUNK ROCK NEIGHBORHOOD 