Where did you go?

Where did you go?

I looked away for a few years. . .
    the first signs of growing up
    my baby girl
    the quieted pigments of imagination

And then,
   Your coffee shoppe no longer pours
   the spider, weaves in a corner of a gallery
   girded by "art"


What became of the band
   Did their orbits break?   Were they reclined into the outward spiral
   Out past the brown lights


I read the wrong review in the North Texas Daily
   perpetually dated today
   You even play two venues next week!
   The Bar of Soap, gone the way of your cafe, and Moon a shuttered nomad

Have all the pleasures been squeezed from your fingers?
How long before they no longer believed you existed.

Though, it is all the better you stay lost

One night, I found myself again

One night, I found myself again. I was scouring spidery old crevices of bureaucracies for an outdated treasure. I longed for blue screens and frantic blocky cursor. . . the faithful scalpel of creaky clerks, who scuttle for shade in the belly of governmental dead-letter offices.

I was drawn to the early glimmerings of technology that stealthily, stubbornly persist to this day. Such things are heavily watermarked with sweaty familiarity, an in-bred allergy to progress, and long forgotten sacrifices upon an altar to genuine usefulness, made by long discarded grand-sires.

A writer of a decade ago would have sought an antique typewriter. Something spindly and frail in its architecture, but famously reliable by reputation. He would have accepted the various quirks of such a machine, like adopting an old hound that likes to circle and prowl after the stooped little old ladies walking home from market.

There are the vicious junk peddlers who pretend legal sensibilities when offering these expired baubles for their original list price. Certainly, amazing given that the moment you drive a car off the lot, its value crashes. And yet, software suited to monochrome orangey, greys and greens. . . for this they ask a premium. No matter. I haven't yet cracked my skull enough times to corroborate the tweed day-dreams of software's used car-salesmen.

Then again, there are the delinquents, with their perpetually black places of business. They offer in a breath, the object of your desires, surely obligation free erotica, and a wholly unrelated set of undesirable infections to co-opt, corrupt and kaput your silicon consciousness. I often have trouble getting over the enormity of their hospitality.

But this is the preferable path, to tread among the spare razors of sharks and self-mutilators; that the right bloody trail will float by. . it seems inevitable.

Hello World! Foo I say! FOO!

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;

- Philip Larkin (a bit earlier in the slog)


It is always better to start with good poetry (namely not mine!). . .


Had a real scare just now. While poking around this computer (batrachian) for software and memorabilia to save during an OS upgrade, it was noticed that the old writing was curiously absent. The house file server contained a few recent backups, but literally nothing else. The old things were simply gone with the half dozen machines that have burned themselves down rather than continue in their servitude (traitors!).

Not good. The ensuing chaos went along these lines:

There was a backup on an external hard drive - burned out a month ago.

There must be a backup on my Jenny's machine - writing folder contained only the same recent works (likely the source of the file server backup)

There was a backup on a 3.5" floppy disk with a sketch of a duck - How would I access such a thing anymore? Perhaps at work? It really didn't matter. All floppy disks were disposed of during decluttering. . . sometime during the summer

Emails - useless. Metacrawler, the host of choice during college when I sent a few things to friends like Thad had also long since committed digital seppuku.

webarchive.org had the homepage to one of old college websites, with "a" poem, but nowhere near the rest of the writing.

Notepad was opened and a desperate attempt to reconstruct something - anything - failed. Memory is elusive when needed, but when it comes to the writing this was always a problem - I could remember a few titles, but not a single line or phrase. Once, there was a poem I reconstructed by accident, and until I realized this fact, I wouldn't share it as I was convinced I'd plagiarized it from someplace.

. . . by this time, i was running around the house (it's quite late) scrounging for tools to pry open the external drive casing, pricing harddrive recovery services online and composing lists of people who might have bits of my writing stowed away in their old email accounts. Some people had the good sense to use things like yahoo or hotmail which have yet to be swallowed by the void.

In one of my early experiments with vmware for a new job, I had converted my laptop at the time. Not everything's there, but ~20 odd years of writing were saved.


So. . . I got nearly everything back.


I'm never going to be a writer in the archaic print sense so far as I can tell. The totality with which I've wasted my creative writing degree laid bare to the desperate lyric of night pacing.

I am going to post it to the blog. All of it.

I haven't the slightest idea what magical moment I was waiting for prior to this evening, but I am awake.