$17

I found a wad of cash cash money bills on the street today. $17 worth. Cha-ching. Between that and finding a MetroCard with $35 on it I feel I am in the money, or as my mother once said “In Dinner.” I never did understand that expression, which she only used once, and which I suspected she had made up.

Finding money is a funny moment, worthy of a comedy routine. I pick it up feeling like a criminal, or a thief. I look around the area to see if there is more money around. I am aware of other people in the vicinity but I pretend they do not exist. I assume they saw the money too, because does not everybody just smell money from dozens of feet away? I assume the smell of money has wafted from the sidewalk to the upper floors of the surrounding apartment buildings. That if I don’t pick it up and if other humans do not pick it up then a swarm of seagulls will appear and devour the money. I picked up the wad of bills and noticed a red stain on one of them. Blood? Emergency semen? I acted as natural about the choreography as I could, so anyone who observed me would not think that I had just scooped up a day’s wages when they could just as easily have done the same. I walked a full block before glancing back to see if anyone had followed me, enraged at me for intercepting their cash wad.

I have been writing all day and while I still feel like doing the same I am in an unexpectedly noisy place where concentration goes to vanish.

I remember finding money on Diplomat Drive, the street where I grew up. Hot Florida sun, the pennies gleamed like headlights on a highway. I saw quarters, dimes, nickels. And a whole lot of pennies. It was like a sack of money had burst. I just remember the feeling of greed, of looking every which way for more pennies, more dimes. The quarters were sparse, as I recall. I was 12 or 13 years old at the time.

…

Therapist has me feeling like a real live writer. It was strange and, appropriately enough, therapeutic to hear her read aloud parts of the story I finished. This is the “too busy to die” story, which I am ready to just let go into the wild. I worry that her encouragement will backfire somehow if the story gets rejected or becomes a controversy. Listening to her read the sentences that jumped out at her I found myself reflexively explaining where that came from. As she kept reading and I kept explaining I realized just how much of mysself is revealed in every thing I write. Almost every sentence from this story comes from some real experience. On that count I only worry that the few sentences that I completely fictionalized will be assumed to come from my heart. It’s nothing to lose sleep over but in a world where public shaming awaits anyone from an all out racist to someone who mis-spelled “chanteuse” it’s ever more of an ocean of eggshells on which we walk. I forgot until today about the fucked up stalker who tracked me down years ago. Oh God that was awful. Life can became an insanely claustrophobic clusterfuck just for stepping into the public realm… And I didn’t even think to tell the therapist about the more recent incident involving me being forced to sign an affidavit stating that I was not a child molester. This ludicrous incident of potentially mistaken identity seemed to eerily echo encounters I had with someone who read my old web site and with whom I chatted on IRC. I will never know if the child molester and the IRC hack were the same. But these things have every capacity to swallow my soul. Putting myself out there puts my very heart and identity up for public consumption. People I do not know, people I will never know are talking about me in ways I cannot control. They might see me as an example of a racial stereotype, or they might project gender biases onto every word I utter. I am putting my point of view and idiosyncracies up for grabs by the biases and partialities of people unknown to me. This is nothing new to me, as anyone who has tracked my web sites over the last 20+ years would assume, but it seemed different today as the therapist read off my words. Today I imagined the same thing happening in other rooms, rooms where I was not present. I recounted to her how years ago I gave a gift to a gf of a framed print of one of my photos. Said gf sent me a picture of where she hung that photo on her dining room wall. It felt vulgar to me. It was, if I say so myself, a “beautiful” picture, as far as one can safely describe their own creation as such. But seeing it on someone’s dining room wall felt like I was looking at my cock and balls hanging there. I think I said all this here already. Doesn’t matter. Point is that I told this to the therapist today and she thought it was “interesting”, whatever that really means. She is such a good person but I don’t know if I want to enlist her as my writing consultant.

I do, however, feel like a writer, at least a little bit moreso than last week, or the week before. As Gertrude Stein must have said: Writers write. What makes a writer different from a non-writer? Writers write, and non-writers do not. Simple as that, right?