Red Room Where the Writers Are

Don't take the brush out of the bathroom.  Leave it on the sink, the right-hand side, please, bristles up.  Keys go on the kitchen counter, next to the wicker basket, not inside.  The wallet goes inside with pens and wintergreen Tic Tacs.  I go over all this with my wife on a monthly basis.  She doesn't listen, or won't.  The brush is often missing.  Often.  I'll step out of the shower and towel the wet from my hair.  I can do these things with my eyes closed in the thick white steam of the after-shower.  My fingers brushed the sweating porcelain of the sink this morning instead of a handle.  The brush was gone.  The day does not start right.

Call it living in a rut if you like.  Or habit.  Really, though, it's nothing but the reassurance of routine that drives these motions.  Perhaps before instant, global communication the world was not so swift to change, but it shifts like a fast boil for me now.  On the way to work, after having been gone only a week, great dirty machines have set up camp along the road.  Mud blisters their crashing teeth.  One half of the road is in rubble.   The deep brown earth bursts forth from the rents.  Concrete barriers have been leveraged into place.  I am herded into new direction, into a snarled knot of tail lights and hanging exhaust.  Brown men in hard hats fling the dying butts of their cigarettes into the wound, watch the traffic crawl by.  It's in their eyes.  I see it.  This is what they do.  It's what they did yesterday and what they'll do tomorrow.  Their fingers are thick and when they push or pull on black levers the machines hiss and lurch into destruction.   I am surrounded by this progress.  It could be that such habit dooms and liberates us.

How does one tell if one is enriched by a change?  Do blossoms unfold into brighter form?  The jarring of my world last week from the trip to California has caused me to consider whether my world is too insular and under-exposed.  Perhaps my mind is small.  I'm so very fearful of losing my way, getting lost in strange places.  The world congests with sensation.  I pare it down with routine.  In this way, the world becomes manageable and perhaps understandable.  I enjoy new places, but I also fear them.  Perhaps it is not a new place that frightens me as much as new people.

My upbringing was highly religious and isolated.  Sinful and bright, the world outside the cult, and it was a cult that I was raised in, held a great attraction.  I always yearned for the things that are forbidden.  What does this say about me?  A vast gulf of difference was instilled between me and everyone else.  There are many stories there, of that life, of hiding fiction, philosophy, and pornography under rocks in the field across the street so my parents wouldn't discover I was reading the Devil's words.  It was the philosophy and eastern religious texts that made them the most fearful.  I was the only ten year old I knew with a stash of Spinoza.  Heidegger and Hustler opened new avenues.  My mother says that I started sounding out words off of signs at six months, that the letters came to me before I could walk.  I suppose this frightened them as well.  To compound the concern, my first word was apparently beer, sounded out off a sign we passed on the way to our devotional meetings.  Wandering is not something I've really done despite how often I've considered it.  I could read before I walked and nothing much has changed through the years in that regard.  Home camp is where the strongest fences square off our safe yards.  To keep the deviled world at bay, it's best to stay in one spot.  Less ground to defend that way.

I struck out blindly across the land once.  In a blue Subaru for Colorado.  I had serial killer hair, a black coat, a back seat full of stylistically over-wrought and surrealist literature.  My heart bursting red with love.  I stayed three months in Colorado Springs, waiting for a girl that had promised to show up.  This was where I wrote the 70K words that I'm looking into making a novel.  I left Colorado fifty pounds lighter despite having my heart turned to rock.  It wasn't a pleasant experience, but necessary in many ways, I think.  The things that happened there hardened my desires for routine.  I've not lost them.  I suppose one could say that my heart and mind are now cult-like themselves.  I work from a strong cage, a cult of many rutted roads.

The brush stays on the sink because I'm weak and fearful.  I secret away in the rocky field of my deep belly the great loves.  Hate hides in my knuckles, glares white and bare in my teeth.  My limbs are long with extremes.  Other people wield an emotional progress through the crashing ministration of instruments both blunt and edged, but I struggle with such change.  A woman's smile ruts and rumbles through the deep soil of these bellied secrets.  Change is a habitual construction within our deep self, not something that approaches us from outside.  I'll not call that deep self a soul, but instead name it a larger body from which we derive, from which we cull our many forms and toss out the structures we recognize as place.  Our youth is a great shaper of this constant force we apprehend as change.  Our upbringing molds who we are to be in each instant, constructs the conscious mind with which we erect our limitations.  Can these fundamental pathways be changed?  I think so.  I have to degrees altered some things, some perceptions.  I suffer the press of a crowded Disneyland with relative ease now.  The traditions of old belief, like vast government, are the slowest to change, however.   These are the governors that keep people planted. 

Can a home-body become a vagabond?  Can a rooted human branch out, seek new sun?  If so, how is it done?  Start by moving the mind, I think.  Every thing starts with a movement of thought.  Fences and freedom and wrought from the same substance.  The world flows forth from the language of thinking.  Control the thought before a step is taken.  Just don't move the damn brush.