[...] losing Language and Outhouses.

I originally started this blog because I have come to recognize my, more often than not, Losing Battle with the Thousand Thoughts, something I fully intend to expound on later. But, I fought so regularly with my internal editor that I couldn’t just get words on a page and leave them alone long enough to sieve through them.  The blog, I thought, would be my excuse, my Place in This Writing World, to just put things down, without theme, without intention, without resolution…sort of like brainstorming for the world to see. I felt it’d make me both accountable and more receptive to criticism.

I’ve not really attempted that, yet, as you may can tell.  Until this morning. (So far so good).

So, this morning:  I’ve got two things on my mind, I mean from the moment I woke up, these were the things most prevalent in my thoughts.  If only they had been the only two. At any rate, a much-overused phrase of mine, I’m going to start sharing those things, in their pure forms. I’m trying to start that right now, today. So, here they are, Roman Numerals I and II.

I

I am more than a little worried that I’m losing words, literally.  Losing language.  I can’t seem to keep clear about words these days, and so, that means, naturally, that I can’t keep clear about writing, either.  It wasn’t always like this, I used to be Faulknerian. But now, embarassingly in conversation, or inevitably while I’m teaching in front of my undergraduates, I’ll rattle off a string of words that don’t entirely make sense…and when you’re teaching literature, composition, and the like, that’s a hard thing to bounce back from. I’m not sure how believable an absent-minded professor can be at my age. 

I thought: Stick to the old writing rule, Kris. Write what you know, what you’ve done, those things should be sliding right along with your blood, so much a part of you as they are. 

And I do, I try my best to write what I know, what I see, what I remember, but in the end, the blood moves too fast, and if I cut myself, I can’t seem to clot. And one of two things happen: I bleed everywhere, all over the page, words falling over themselves, which I allow, because I think – get it all out, the “right” words are in there somewhere, OR, in effort to stanch the flow, I panic and restrict my creativity to a condensed single line, a quip – my plays are itching with this rash; it seems that I quip more often than bleed these days…until I started blogging and convinced myself that there was too much space online to waste on quips. 

I’m sick of quips, and in love with them.  What an ironic blister: I mean, what kind of writer’s block makes you write quips, even when you’re finally focused and getting fuller, richer sentences to form?  Maybe I’m just innately a boring man. Or worse yet, simply aware of my own truth: I’m as much a failure as a success.

I start so many plays but finish nothing, I bet I have a hundred plays throbbing on my jump drive, all shapes and sizes, and it’s not that I don’t have motivation, or I should say inclination…I know plenty of people in the industry, none that are paid to care about one more writer, though. I don’t really mind, and I suppose that’s the problem, so I write for myself, or this blog, or a few friends, but I have such ennui, the older I get, and I don’t know where it stems from.

No, that’s not true, I do. 

I’m worried to death that I’m losing language because I’m losing myself. I’m worried that I’m about to go insane, like the majority have on my Semitic side.  Mostly, I’m terrified by the thought; sometimes, I’m propelled by it, almost eager in my anticipation for it: to, at last, understand my mother, her mother, to, in some form, connect with them. Nothing else has worked; perhaps, it’s the madness that keeps us together, hogs let loose in a stall, bumping our fat backside histories into each other, rooting in the mud for a cool spot for just ourselves. Hogs, I think, are jealous beasts. They know the knife is coming, and so, they grow selfish of their time. Of their mud. Of their coolness.

I also get easily overwhelmed at the responsibilities of being an “artist.” Because what else am I really?  A man is known by the company he keeps, and the only company I’ve ever kept and entertained is writing, is words, and now I think they’re leaving me, after all this time, tired of the wait.  The incessant pressure to create; the greater pressure to succeed.  I get the terms confused, the goals off course, the purpose corrupted.  But, I can’t cook enough food, or keep the beds made long enough, to keep them, I’m afraid. And that’s no way to treat company.

And yet. I’m driven by this fear that I’m losing a grip on reality.  That there’s a perverse joy in typing this, not in my private letters, but on a public blog.  Some might say that’s a cry for help, but it’s been my experience that there’s never a noise so loud as a cry when someone needs help.  When they want it.  I’m not crying; so, I don’t feel this is the case with me.  No, it’s about accountability. 

All I’ve ever known is severe accountability.

In the Baptist denomination, the age of accountability is about twelve…so, really, I suppose I’m just keeping with routine, since I’ve been making myself accountable for almost twenty years now.  And what have I discovered?

That I’ve become a confessionalist. 

Despite Dr. Lest; the only professor I’ve ever had who failed me on a paper. Granted, I got prose, poetry, prosody confused, I was learning, but god what’s a term? The bones of the paper were solid, the meat was good meat. I wrote a great paper, about O’Hara, and he’s the one who missed the point; he stole the poem afterwards, though. I’d appended a poem, that I written, having been so inspired by O’Hara, a poet I’d never before heard of.  The paper was returned, the poem was not. And even though Dr. Lest laughed when he read aloud our “Thoughts on What Poetry Is,” anonymously, that someone in the class, me, felt that poetry was all confession. He merely reinforced that in me; I believe it still.

Maybe I’m not even a playwright, not a poet, just an opportunist of my own insecurities and infidelities and neuroses. That’s what a confession is, right? 

The crazier thing is that, all along, all this time, I had no idea I’d grow up to be a conflict; accepting that it is one thing, but I’m not sure which one I am yet:  man vs. fate, man vs. nature, or man vs. himself, society, or, what’s more likely, God. And not knowing is quite another thing, entirely.

II

I’m heading, now, this weekend, back home. I have an outhouse to tackle.

It’s directly behind U.L.’s house, a bit south of the first line of trees and suckle vine; it’s been there for years.  And it’s not the only one. There are several more scattered over the hundreds and hundreds of acres that stretch through the pine to who knows where. I’ve been told it stretches all the way past Bond Road, and if you kept a steady foot, after several days of walking you’d reach the Old Shelt House. All alone, sitting in the middle of a small ring of crepe myrtle, with its wild hair.

Who didn’t know about the Shelt House. She’d murdered her husband and her children, and locked herself in the attic, determined to suffocate herself in the insulation; the Depression was such a horrible shame to so many. She, like most of her evil-dead kind, only came out at midnight on Halloween, but being fair to those who might not celebrate Halloween (we didn’t, for instance, and instead of candy, collected canned goods to give to the needy and unfortunate children, who, on at least three occasions, I often saw on Halloween night dressed to the nines in costumes getting enough candy to rot dentures while I stood in simple clothes – though once I got to be Cookie Monster – and beg for a dented can of peaches which I could have just put in their plastic pumpkin right then, but I digress), Old Mrs. Shelt also came out at random times throughout the year. I still never saw her, even though she was nice enough to come out again; somehow, she was always only seen by couples, in high school, on weekend nights, who were, for some reason, in the middle of the woods, alone.

To me, this outhouse, though, it’s almost a shrine.  It’s going to be rather hard to tear it down, because with it will go many childhood memories. (We’ll talk more later about how sad it is that a child should have any memories, whatsoever, attached to an outhouse).

But, it stood, and had for all these years, by my favorite climbing tree and was a top-notch guardian to my rusted stew pot in which I collected beige gravel. Those smooth pebbles had nearly reached the lip of that dateless, blue-spotted pot when it disappeared.  Soon after, went the tree. I guess, it was only a matter of time before the outhouse would have to go, as well.

And, oh, I’ve wondered all sorts of delectable things about this particular outhouse closest to the house: like, who was the last person to use it back when we had the farm; how did so many bird cages get left inside of it; when did we ever have birds, in the first place; why was a sewing machine, no make that three, of them in this outhouse, maybe they were worth money – I could certainly have used them when I played Mud Pie Bakery, don’t ask me how, I just knew I could; and most importantly, was the fact of its prior function the reason that so many beautiful plants grew, thrived around it, a veritable moat of flora.

I’m hoping I find out some of these things…I work a lot better with a good story. And, really, when work of any type involves an tearing down an outhouse, one known to harbor yellow jackets and red wasps (an allergy), poison ivy and a holly bush bent on world domination – wouldn’t you work better with a good story, too?

Or, at the least, come up with a good one when you’re done…? Yeah, I thought so…

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