An Atonal Gaffe

The obvious thing to write about and the thing I've been dancing idly about for the past three days is the Fleetwood Mac concert. I've wanted to write about it because it was amazing. It was fantastic. It was so much of the cool air and the lights and epiphany that it made its own space between reality and a fantasy world where people ride dragons in the sky. Otherworldly and yet it fit into this long, strange, eventful summer.

So I've wanted to write about it for those reasons and I haven't because once you commit something in words you begin to get over it, you know? Once you begin the process of working the magic out of something (with little pressing fingers and inky tinctures) and trying to force your own fractured magic back into it with language...you begin to see your own muse as a predator, seeking the delicate prey of inspiration for its hungry mistress to spatter and demolish.

And I hate that. I hate the ephemeral quality of things. I hate loss. Mostly, I hate the loss of wonder. What it was to have been there and hearing the guitars go and their voices ring out and slowly it becomes memory and sepia and you've got to clean out the toilet and it having happened or not is less sure in your mind.

Though, I suppose, writing is the only antidote to it. Better to have it in pieces with paste finger prints and slash marks and scrambled images that put people's heads on other people's bodies than to allow everything meaningful and beautiful slowly become everything else and have everything else slowly become everyone else's.

I guess, the main thing I got out of the concert, besides the absolute perfection of Lindsey Buckingham and the incontrovertible perfection of Stevie Nicks is my desire to make something. To have something that stands and affects and works its cure or its poison.

I mean, essentially, they're artists. And they've made music and songs and those things don't go away even if they wanted them to. And they get to present their work and see that it makes people feel good and they get to feel good back.

I know that writing is different. It's a solitary act and it is malicious and violent and it hates me and I have to kick it and strangle the muse back into her case and I have to be in the room with her while she makes her...noises.

I don't know how to start or to get going. I just keep buying books and hoping I fall somewhere good. I keep hoping I'll dig some vein that will impress me enough to kill all these other dead ends. Too many choices just dilute the power of this, the true choice. The one option that taps this boil and drains this pus away so that I don't pick and pick at it and watch it mass into something that kills me.

I am willing to claim my title whole-heartedly but it falls against this track record of nothing. Potential. False starts. Self-pity. And my ultimate foe. Rationalization with its unlimited arsenal.

I just want to write. I don't care what it is. I don't care who its for. I don't want to "succeed" with it and ride it like a carnival ride to something greater than itself. I am feeling its wrench in me. On my gut. I wish. I want. I need. I do.

I do. I do. I do. Over and over again. And all the while the world's turning.

Please don't understand this. I think I do but I don't need to. I need to write.