We look into a luncheonette, somewhere in a big city. The door from the street is stage left, flanked by large glass windows. An opening to the back is stage left. The counter runs across the stage, with four tattered chrome stools bolted to the floor. Pastry displays clutter the diner top; glass refrigeration cases are behind. Upstage there are three two-top tables, with chrome diner chairs on either side.

PADDY:

(Enters the diner from the street and sits at the counter. HE wears a clown suit and carries a red wig in his hand. He wears no makeup. His earlobes are stretched out to the size of silver dollars by ebony African ear extenders. HE sits with his back to us)

SELMA:

(Enters from the opening to the back. SHE sees PADDY and smiles brightly. SHE crosses the stage slowly. PADDY doesn’t take notice. SELMA goes to the register, looks at PADDY. Waits. Hits the No Sale button. The register bell rings. No reaction from PADDY. SHE hits the sale button, the drawer springs open and smacks her in the chest. SHE falls back against the wall. Still nothing. Hugging herself, she shuffles back to the nearest table, pulls the chair out and sits down with a groan)

Do those hurt?

PADDY:

(Turns and looks at her)

SELMA:

I pierced my ears for my 80th birthday. That hurt.

PADDY:

Do you wear lipstick?

SELMA:

(Shakes her head)

PADDY:

(Stands and walks out the back exit, leaving the red wig on the counter)

SELMA:

(Watches PADDY leave. SHE reaches into her house coat and rummages in her pockets. SHE retrieves a thick tube and rolls the bright red lipstick out as far as it can go. SHE puts the lipstick to her face and draws a clown smile, big and messy, on her wrinkled lips. SHE reaches up and smooths her silver hair, then lifts it up. SHE puts her wig on the table. Her hair is wispy, like a baby. SHE smiles.)

LIGHTS DOWN

This field has lay fallow but the crops are thriving on other parts of our land.

That’s how I imagine a farmer would explain the barrenness here on drmstream.

I didn’t grow up on a farm. I did grow up in a place where families still worked the land. Cows would  shamble into our backyard to eat fallen apples. A dairy operated at the top of the road. Woods thick enough to get lost in surrounded our houses.

This morning when I drove to the train station I passed the big stone wall at the end of the reservoir and thought, I should go stand at the bottom and look at the sky.

What do you want to feel, I wondered. Awe? The sense of occupying some other time? Release?

You want to evoke the mystery of a place.

The writer Harrison Solow shared a moving piece recently that recounts a life-changing experience in Wales that brought her back to creative work.

At the end of this post — neither essay, nor note, but an elegy to experience — she succumbs to her nature, which, I’ve learned as I’ve read her occasional pieces, is generous and instructive. She shares a conclusion about her experience.

The lessons learned from this experience are disparate and manifold, but above all is this one: Write what you hear in the silence around you. Don’t write about it.

Yes. This works.

But what works more is the deeply authentic passion that makes her recounting of the mystery of Wales so real. She holds it up with veneration and respect, a Priestess of the moment. Step in, she says. I have an experience that is greater than myself. Share it with me.

That’s my image of the farmer. My image of the land. That’s the onslaught of words that spill in gleeful disorder all around me, that abundance of words, that unruly, sun-seeking germination of words.

Over these last four months, I’ve been off tending to crops in fields in the back acres. They take a long time to ripen. They require attention to harvest. They turn into one-act plays. They turn into novels. They resist partial sharing.

I’ve given them the time that they have asked for and feel good for that.

Ah. Here’s the image…

drmstream is a farm stand, where the excess crop gets laid out for passers-by. The countless acres that make up my imagination produce the main crop. I’ve been out in the fields. It’s good honest work and I pray that we don’t get struck by an early frost.

There is the idea of writing. There is the act of writing. Then there is everything in between.

That’s where I have all the trouble.

This thought came to me in the middle of a shower and lingered with me all day. The thought came with such a sharp flash and the easy glibness of a not very good thought that I didn’t expect to remember it later. But there it was, rattling around all day, while I ate a slice of pizza, shopped for clothes for my daughter, put together a bed for my son, pulled out of a tight parking space, browsed through the bookstore.

The bookstore was a big reprimand. It should be inspiring, or intimidating, or even enviable. Not today. The bookstore said to me, “hey, if you’re not going to deal with all the things in between the idea of writing and the actual writing, then you should just drop it. You are just going to frustrate yourself and waste your time.”

I felt so exposed that I couldn’t even talk to the book lady.

I mean that literally. She walked into the nook where I was standing and my immediate reaction was to want to slip between two books into the stacks. Nothing she did warranted the reaction. It was just that the bookstore had thoroughly called me out, and I figured that when the bookseller looked at me in the aisle, shopping bags sprouting from both fists, she assumed that I was just another tourist in the world of books. Worse, if I tried to say something in her language, my accent would be off and I would get the syntax wrong, becoming more pathetic in my attempt to make it look like I knew what is going on.

She walked off without taking note of me. I was left with that thought rattling around in my head.

This was the second part of the thought.

If you going to have all this trouble with the part in between, why even bother trying to get through it.

The part in between is everything that I have to do to get to the part where I write, and to make the things that I write fit into the ideas that I have about writing.

The part in between is thinking through the idea of the book, laying out the framework, building the story and the characters, making the schedule to write and then following it. The part in between is avoiding all of the distracting other ideas that flash into my mind every other moment. It’s pushing through to the end no matter how the work turns out. That’s everything that is in between.

It is hard work and more often than not I’m not successful.

That feels crappy.

While I stood in the shower I did a quick calculus: you are 53, and you’ve got a lot on your plate. You need to build your business back to where it can provide security for your family. You have children to spend time with, a wife you love being around. Every one of these things–these important, necessary and worthy things–can take every minute of the day. Even if you write the things you plan to write, it’s not likely to amount to much of anything. You don’t express yourself as clearly, think as originally, as other people you read or encounter. And wouldn’t you feel more comfortable in your life if you weren’t always beating yourself up about not keeping to the work schedule that you set out for yourself.

How would you answer yourself?

I fall back on an odd kind of personal faith.

This line of thinking is a reaction to the discomfort that comes with writing for me. This discomfort is so profound that I didn’t write for more than 15 years. I am writing now and I can’t let the voice of discomfort get me off track.

One thing I’ve learned is that this line of thought isn’t going to change. I am always going to struggle to get the work done and I am never going to be pleased with myself. My job is making sure that frame of mind never matters, that it doesn’t keep me from writing too long.

I’m even embarrassed to be writing this. There are people who I admire for their creative fortitude who are dying. The country is processing an unthinkable tragedy. Good artists can’t get an opportunity to be heard. Storytellers are patiently crafting stories of the present that leave people feeling hollow and overwhelmed. My crude practice of a craft is of little consequence to these big themes. Nor is it material to the life that I lead day by day as a father, husband, business man.

The only reason it matters is because it is something that I can’t shake, this habit of thinking about writing, planning writing, and the writing. Yes, the writing. I like to write.

I don’t subscribe to endings. The world is a series of discontinuations. When I stop here, I’ll pick up somewhere else. By leaving here, I’ll acknowledge that I would be much more comfortable if I didn’t worry about writing, that the writing I do won’t amount to much, but that I’ll keep plugging along in my trivial work regardless, bearing the discomfort and hoping that I get far enough out of my own way that I finish this work I want to do and that someday, somehow somebody reads it.

Baby, I know what it’s like to be in that boy’s head.

I’ve been there.

Not the guns and stuff.  Not killing kids.  That’s fucking sick.  

But I’ve been in that place the kid got to.

Tell you?  I can’t fucking tell you. It’s too painful to remember.

Can tell you what I was thinking.  The whole school sitting in the dining hall, the teachers and the priests looking like fucking moppets, preening and smiling. The noise is eating my brain away. An army of rats chewing through my skull.  I can’t hear a single thing though.

I’m just figuring out where to cut that big beam over the room so it will crack and crash onto the table.  Crush them.  They’ll stop smiling.  They’ll all fucking scream. They’ll all stop smiling.

I can’t stand the fucking smiles.

That’s the thinking.

It hurts. You just want to run away from it.  

Who knows where the fuck you’ll run to.

Whatever happened inside that kid’s brain was him running into a dark place and there was nobody who could pull him out and he didn’t have any clue why he was there.  That’s just fucking crazy and it’s out there for every one of us.  We just looked fucking crazy in the eyes and it burns up our soul.

What?  No, I’m not going to do something like that you stupid shit.  It just kills me to know that I’ve got some part of that monster in me.

The road is empty now. School is back in session, so the buses come out early to take the children to class. This is the time when the other traffic ebbs as well. The ground is getting hard and the days shorter. The landscapers put their tools away for the winter. Every now and then you see a pickup truck with the snow plow mounted, but there is isn’t the feel of snow in the air. There won’t be for at least 6 weeks now.

Ethan walks ahead. He says it’s because we shouldn’t be two across on the road during the morning rush. I know that he wants to be alone with his own thoughts. I do too. It’s easier to walk a few yards behind him than right beside him. The sighs and wheezes are barely distinguishable, especially on a windy day when the leaves rattle.

We have walked this stretch of road, day in and day out, for 40 years. The trees were shorter then, and Ethan taller, and the days always felt like they ran out even before they had gotten started.

On our walk there is one part where we go past a stand of old oaks. They grew hundreds of years ago at the intersection of three fields. The farmer — or maybe him and his neighbors — squared off a piece of land with a solid stone fence. Ethan says it’s about ¼ acre. He’s always been curious about who owns the scrap of land. He even had a lawyer look into it once. He’s lost interest in that kind of thing now. If he were to talk about it, he’d probably say that it doesn’t make much sense to grab hold of things when time is slipping away.

If the Ethan I walked with 40 years ago could hear the Ethan I walk with today talk like that about time slipping away, he would scoff and say, “That is a crock of shit.” Today’s Ethan would probably walk a little quicker and say nothing. He would just hide in plain sight.

I want to show the old Ethan how well the oak trees are doing, even today. They’ve weathered a lot of storms, tons of salt flung on the roads, endless months of dry summers, and the reckless destruction that accompanies building house after house after house. The oaks have been unattended and unbothered. They are on land without laws and they have flourished.

Tomorrow I go back to see Dr. Morris. I will bring him this journal. He’ll read my thoughts. I’ll talk to him about the medication. I’ll heard what he has to say.

My equilibrium is better now. That is a quaint notion, but when I went to see him for the first time, I felt like my insides had been torn out. When he asked me what was wrong, I couldn’t utter a sound.

If he asks me tomorrow what is wrong, I’ll be able to tell him something. Or I can tell him that it doesn’t really matter. The answer is simple. I was a fool. A blind, careless, foolish woman.

Ehtan stopped at the oak tree this morning and looked to me.

“I’m not going to take the whole walk today. I’m going to go back in a few minutes.”

Now I know not to go back follow him back. I did that one time to check on him. He did not hear me come in. He was in the kitchen leaning against the counter with his pants around his ankles. He was holding his cock in his hands. The sack of his balls was like chicken wattle, and the veins in his hand were like a spider web wrapped around his groin, but the head of his cock was pink and swollen, like a teardrop. The phone was on speaker and some sultry voice was whispering over and over, Come for me baby.

He didn’t see me. I’m glad that he didn’t because I felt sad and didn’t want him to feel sad too. That pink teardrop was once so firm and warm, and I’d want to pull it inside me and close my eyes so hard I saw stars.

I don’t want to feel worried every day. If that is what my life is going to be like, I just want to end it. I can’t stop worrying. I know that it is all going to come to an abrupt, startling close. Before it does, I just want to feel free and happy again. I want to hear my heart sing. I want Ethan to smile at me. I want him to lean against the counter and yank at his flaccid cock like a fire crew pulling the hose out to a three-alarm fire, and then I want our eyes to meet and for us to laugh, just laugh and laugh and laugh at the crazy beauty of it all.

Dr. Morris and his pills can’t give me that, but I don’t want to start hoping for that feeling to go away.