Writing Crash Page 3

This was my literary version of riffing. It wasn’t so much “free-styling”, but rather just opening the gates and seeing what would flow out.

  I liked the first chapter yesterday – I had a vague recollection of reading it again the night before this day-after. My mind briefly returned to a moment of indulgence where I actually read some of it aloud, a self-indulgent and pretentious act that my hypocrisy easily entertained.

  I wondered what my wife would have thought of this. Would she have been amused or bemused? Spell-bound or bored?

  To be honest, in the state I was in, it was very difficult to determine anyone else’s reactions, emotions or general demeanor. I was beyond empathy or understanding – wallowing in the selfishness of alcoholic excess.

  But I had opened the door and was curious to see what would flow out.

  Sometimes this took me to a dark and lonely place – a place that I dared not visit in the sober light of control and correctness. There had been literary voyages into vast untapped corners of my sub-conscious that should have stayed unexplored. Like an interesting place that was an “experience”, but you wouldn’t go back. A “Ping-Pong” bar in Bangkok where the extraction of Ping-Pong balls from the tired vagina of a bored and drugged-up Thai hooker was the tamest of items to be retrieved from her nether regions.

  As I said, an “experience”, but I didn’t want to go back.

  Well, once the gates were opened, there was no way to shut them just yet. The words flowed, a current too strong to stem the tide.

  I needed a first person narrative in the story…I knew that. The third person worked well for Tobias in the car and it provided me with a challenge. I had never been very strong in the third person. To write in the third person required taking on an outside view, not judgmental but certainly more journalistic. To be impartial and objective – less personal but still connected. That was my challenge.

  But, for the 1st person, I needed easy words. Dark words. My mind was already open to the thought of someone paralyzed, or unable to communicate normally. My mind thumped, my brain jumped around inside my skull – smashing into the bony plates.

  Visions of words filled me when I closed my eyes, ricocheting through my consciousness like a pinball in an endless game. Nothing could escape, pent up anger, guilt, frustration and remorse. How that eats a soul from within when it has no means of escape – these things devour their creator. Patricide by debilitation – I understood the pain, the suffering. The self-imposed exile.

  I zoned out and wrote as the words floated – my eyes closed and I typed…