Nowhere, man. Nowhere

And sometimes when you can't think of anything to write you just close your eyes and let the latent anxiety and joy trembling in your fingertips find a home out there in the ether. At what point does our language become coherent and instinctual, when do we stop thinking about it? And do you and I really speak the same language, or do we each have our own with overlaps based on familial and geographical relationships, education, tendency towards poetics?

I've done my best over the last half-dozen years to situate myself in the space between independence and isolation. To take control of my domain, my life, my experience. And then once a year my doting parents, their fears and ambitions vast and frigid as tundra, visit and every scaffolding I've arranged is either shoved into a corner or temporarily disassembled. I can smell the fear on them. And they try their hardest to convince me of its validity. Since they've arrived there has been no writing, no exercise, no reading. Just work and then sitting around wringing hands with nothing to talk about and finally me smoking under the covers at midnight so I can sleep for a few hours.

Next Wednesday marks the falling action in the most chaotic month of my life. I've felt the full range of emotion, and the hybridization of various strains I had never imagined. I don't want a reprieve, not necessarily, but 30 free seconds to scribble some lines about it. An hour to lay down and stare at my blank whiteboard for inspiration. A late-night foray out into the neighborhood to collect impressions, indentations, instances of anxiety. Alcohol saturating my cytoplasm.