When is time unwasted? Wasteless. When do efficiencies and bullseyes come together to maximize not just the moment but the hours, weeks, years that led to this. When do the gears turn with a frenzy of conception and birth and the reckoning of death all in one puff of air? I know very little time not wasted. Today will be a fresh essay in waste, a day invoked with a canticle of singsong in my head: Why am I even doing this? Of course the answer in the form of a question is dismal but sound: What the hell else am I going to do? I remember a friend describing his neighbors, or people he knew from work. He found little inspiration in their conversations or interactions but for all that he had to concede one positive: They’re people. They are there. At that point in this friend’s life reliable, present people were hard to find. Has that ever changed? Has anything evere changed? That friend and I exchanged hours upon hours of cassette tape letters. Spoken word correspondences versus written, although we did long form letters as well as cassettes. Where does all that correspondence sit today, and what glimmer of inspiration might it possess these 3 decades later? Was there ever inspiration in those missives? Or just filling time with waste… Wasting time with fill…
I feel vortexes of hate in my brain. All of it directed at myself. I love my life when I am in the shower, sitting, the hot water steadily and firmly pushing onto the back of my neck. That is my happiest moment. It makess me moan and grunt involuntarily, and somehow it makes me feel the full nakedness of the moment. I feel safest naked. I wish “naked” wasn’t such a culturally loaded word. Nudity is, itself, a punchline in many genres of comedy, and being naked is most people’s idea of uncomfortable or better left to one’s alone time. I feel safest naked because everyone can see I’m OK. It’s the same thinking I’ve heard from stage actors. They feel safest on stage, where everyone can see they are OK. You would think being on stage would be a nervous situation, and maybe it is at times. But to some it is their safest place.
