The burning mount.

Strange things have been happening in the past few weeks. I was in Milano, where I was also subsequently mugged while enjoying(some would say enduring) a wonderfully ancient city. I am now spending half the week or more in Huntsville Alabama, where my job responsibilities has very swiftly evolved from the sort of laconic turgidity I enjoy, to a more dynamic presence. I wonder whether it is something worth being happy about, or something worth being sad about.

At the moment I am sitting in a room with a variety of papers to read, my phone ringing as if Dire Straits are playing a two set show at the Orpheus and I have tickets, and I am wondering if perhaps somewhere along the way I have been letting go of the parts of me I actually enjoyed most. I still write but without the urgency of vanity. I still read but without the hunger of superiority. I still do everything I am accustomed to doing, but I have become accustomed to doing them.

There is a point in our lives when we have to deal with death, and there is no greater death than the ones we experience day after day, night after night, in the cool bosom of violent blue morning. I will continue the short story I was beginning earlier and it will progress according to the speed at which I let the words grow. The goal of that story was to capture a bit of the Russian/French ideology, that aging veneer of class that turns a sneer into a smile, that raises glances, always they are raised. There is something in that quiet moral solitude that I have recently been very enamoured of...perhaps it is the way it mirrors my own developments. A writer, even an amateur writer, has only the palette of his own experiences with which to explain an idea or establish a causal relationship. That is what we do, really. We create relationships with words, between words, outside of words - those relationships means something to us and the theory is that they mean something to you.

What then, is the point? If this is true, if we can turn our own experience into something the reader knows with salt stained conviction is true, then we have proven, in some measure, that humanity exists. We have proven that we are not alone, that even if the Earth is the last mourning son of the father, we are not alone. We can not be, we must stand for something, in the end. I think that is an amazing thing. I think it is an impossible feat. Yet there are those writers who have done so with an ease that is "tres terrible" and yet so full of despair that one wonders whether impossible should remain in the language of men and women at all. I am rambling. I hope you enjoy my thoughts. I will return shortly.

-Rich
though we weren't last in line