I have this dream of writing a western.

Not really – you know, a whole novel (because hell if I can finsih anything anymore). BUt at least a short story.

In concept, it makes complete sense. My fiction is all tough-guy, man of action, violence, loneliness, and heartbreak. Bikers, cowboiys, private eyes; noir of the old west.

I have it in me, because – well, I can fucking write.

The trouble I’m having though – aside from the never having a fucking minute to myself problem – is that I just can’t find the form. I can’t quite internalize what a western really is, what it should be. I’ve attempted Loius L’amour, larry McMurtry, Zane Gray, Jack Schaefer, Cormac McCarthy. It’s not that I don’t like them – some, anyway. But it’s that I can’t find that onw voice that resonates enough to do it myself.

With Noir and hard-boiled crime fiction, i have it; I’ve read enough Dashiell Hammett, enough Raymon Chandler, enough Ross Macdonald and Dennis Lehane and John MAcDonald, enough James M. Cain and Elmore Leonard. I get it; I speak it. I can write it.

But the western isn’t resonating with me yet; I’m not hearing it in my head.

I’m currently reading Hondo by Loius L’amour. I have a real weakness for Loius L’amour, because my grandfather used to read him, and I’d find the paperbacks around our house, and pick ’em up and read. I like L’amour’s masculine, strong prose. But I struggle with the cliches, the tendancy to tell us over and over, that Our Hero is A Hero; repeated referneces to strength, hardness, squinty eyes.

It’s not my prose, as a reader, or as a writer.

Maybe it’s the mode problem; I am always most comfortable working in first person, and I’ve yet to read a western that’s not third-person. Maybe I can’t find the voice to narrate in the voice of an 1870’s westerner. Sure, I can get around it; I could narrate as the side-kick, or push myself to write third person; but perhaps I just can’t hear the narrative because I have yet to read any in that mode.

I tought myself to write by reading; I have an ear for narrative and dialog, and know when something sounds right; when it’s clean and sharp, when it’s awkward. I know it by feel, not because I learned the rules and follow them. Rules and I have an uneasy relationship. So I need a model, a sound, a structure. Not to follow, but to measure against – Does This Sound Wrong.

So my search continues. Maybe the form is more appealing in concept than in fact; maybe, really, I just do not love the western. But in my head there’s a rough, damaged man in faded denim and worn-down boots; a man who’s fraught and lost, who’s running from his past, or himself. A man who’s got a last battle to fight, before he goes down and dies in the dust, or finds himself in the wild lands and the struggle for some greater good.

I have a character, I can see him. I just have to find a story and a voice.

 

 

It’s been a long time wince I’ve really WRITTEN something.

 

Not some cute pics of my kids, or pix of how sexy I am with muscles and scary facial hair, or arty photos of some rock or rusty tractor.

 

I mean actually write.

 

I used to write about politics – about how much I fucking hate our system, and the people in it; about how I wind up having to vote for a guy I think is a wimp, becauise my other option is a member of the freakiest cult in the world, untel scientology showed up, and a man utterly without moral compass or any sense of personal honor. I just to make that sort of a screed entertaining. And sometimes good. Now, I don’t even make it.

I also used to write stories –  some true, some false, most someplace in between; ambiguity leads to better fioction. I used to fucking teach people how to write, because dammit, I was good.

Now? It’s not that I’m not good ; it’s that I’m just not. This shit here isn’t writing, it’s ambien-fueled thrashing, posing in the vague forms, assuming the shapes, but not actually producing anything.

As I type this, small, hairy spiders bigin to creep over my keyboard. I like ambien.

What I mean to say isn’t just to bitch about my failures; they’re not real failures. They’re failures to start, rather, not failures to do what I do.

“I know I have a novel in me,” my friend Myles said the other day. And yeah, he does; I can smell it on him like scotch and success. And god dammit, I sure as fuck have a novel – not a; several. But let’s sart one before we visualize the second. I have ideas for a half dozen books, easily; my problem isn’t ideas, or narrative; it’s simple attention span. It’s also simple being awake long enough.

I have to write, to get this going. And the brilliant thing is, no one reads anymore, so I might as well start here.

 

It was a dark and stormy Night…

 

Wait that isn’t right. Maybe something in a wilder vein.

 

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive . . .”And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about 100 miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”

 

Um, wait. That might have been done.

 

I guess I need to do this in my own words.And to be honest, this work is old, but I have not pulled it out and worked on it in years.

Here goes.

 

====

Tires on the highway. The wind in the old tin box of a van I drive. Blood in my veins. Whiskey in my skull. 

Motörhead – Lemmy doing something you might call singing, the crank-drain making his voice just right to tell me about life on the road and jailbait and dirty love and the ace of spades. A story I pretend the tattoos on my arms would also tell you, but it’s the ones on my back that really have a story. 

Roaring. All of it. And I was roaring back.

I was leaving some trouble behind me I guess. Or so I like to think. Really the trouble was over, a thing with a girl, and some tattoos, and some booze and some drugs. And then the girl was gone and I wasn’t, which was the wrong way for it to have ended.

I roared back at Lemmy.

——

Wait there’s more. Lets skip a bit, til after the cops stop him.

——

“Son, I’m startin’ to think you got some problems,” the sherif said. 

I turned my head and looked at him. Wished I still had some sunglasses. “Well. Yeah. You could say that.”

“So I tell you what. You quit dicking me around and tell me something true,  and I won’t haul you off to my jail unless you’re doing something to deserve it.”

I sighed. Told him my name. Told him I was just passing through. He wanted to know where I was headed.

“Fuck if I know. Maybe I’m just – easy rider, y’know?”

He chuckled. “You know how that movie ends, right? Damn though, I liked those choppers.”

I decided right there I wasn’t going to have to kill the sheriff. So that was good.

“So you’re running away then, yeah? So just tell me something. Because I will check on it. Tell me if that thing you’re running away has a cop’s name connected to it, or a warrant.”

It didn’t. The only name I was running away from was tattooed on my back. So that’s what I told him.

“Girl?” he asked.

“Dead girl.” I answered.

 

 

========

 

 

That’s how it starts. And I know how it finishes. And I know there’s a girl – another girl, because this guy, like me, will always, always have another girl. But unlike me, death tends to hover near him, not so you can see, but so, if your nose is sharp, you can maybe smell it a little, after he leaves the bar.

The middle is there the issue is; and not so much because I don’t know what it is, but because I can’t seem to make it exist. Yet.

I will start again. Now. I will write something. Doggeral or drivel, but I’ll write some words, about something that matters. And when I have ten, or twenty, or a thousand words, somehow, I may be writing again.

 

Because my soul dies when I hear others discuss writing like it’s something than can do, just because they go to school. Writing – my writing  – rips itslf of of the fucking soul, because it has to. You don’t teach that, unless you’re some sadistic bastard; you don’t learn it on purpose. You don’t have it at all; you simply ARE that; the question is only, does it go to paper, or is it taken out on flesh.

 

 

 

 

I’m trying to recall the last time i wrote anything.

Wow, I can’t.

I sort of want to blame facebook. Just because I hate facebook so much that it seems like a good thing to blame.

My updates are all there, I want to say. And on twitter.

Only it’s not true. I don’t update on facebook, and a barely tweet.

Is it any wonder then, that my friends keep asking me if i’m ok?

My answer: I don’t know.

My yardstick for ‘ok’ is so askew these days, I can only answer in relation to how I was.

Than last week? Yes, much better (I had a cold).

Than last weekend? Yes, a bit, the cortisone shot helped the pain in my shoulder.

Than last month? I can’t fucking remember.

Than six months ago? Yeah, i think so. I think, just maybe, yes.

Than a year ago? Than two, or three?

I can’t remember when I was just ok, with no caveats. Or to be more specific, I remember the times – the short, sweet, perfect moments are crystal clear in my memory, with flavors and scents and sound.

I just can’t remember how long ago that was; it’s too much of a fucking blur.

So I have to reel it in, measure on a closer scale. And that gets really, really hard. Because the context, the perspective, the range and distance are all missing. Dead-reckoning by instinct in the dark, the way you walk through your bedroom in pitch black and know where the door and the bed are, unless you stop and think.

But today? Yeah, ok.

I keep trying to get a breath, though. To get that little bit of distance ahead to start thinking, what do I need to actually be good again? And I can’t see it. Too close in; I’m in the thick of battle, fighting so many small and large fights all the time that I can’t see a battle, let alone know how to win it.

I’m wearing down; I can feel it. I can feel my body aging, and my mind with it. Some tide of battle surges up against me every time I think I’ve almost a some skirmish.

This would be easier if my battle-field metaphor were more true; brute force solves some problems so elegantly.

This is the battle on inches though; of minutes. And I’m losing it in tiny, almost immeasurably small increments. Like when something moves so slow you can’t only see it if you sit utterly still.

I can’t sit still; I can’t see the tiny progress forward or back.

So I need to do something to change the scale. I just don’t know what.

My head’s been in a strange place of late.

While my shoulder heals well ahead of schedule, my sleep still falls victim to it’s ache. My normal sleep habits – a mess at the best of times – are now completely fractured.

It’s no secret that I’ve been had hell’s own time writing recently, to the point where I had lost all care or interest in it. But over the last couple of weeks, I’ve begun to feel the return of some faint muse.

Characters are starting to regain their voices. Only, they are doing so in the middle of the night.

Every night this week, when I’m just down far enough into the well of sleep that I can’t drag back out without struggle (or caffeine), I start thinking of things I need to write. Characters, stories, themes, settings.

I actually got up one night over the weekend, with this piece of dialog in my head:

“Where’d this come from,” she asked me, running a finger over the faintly puckered skin above my right ear.

The scar itself was numb, but the skin around it was oddly sensitive. It tingled when she traced it’s jagged outline.

“Walked into a door,” I said.

She stroked my scalp, the day and a half of stubble making a faint scraping sound.

“I like it,” she said.

It wasn’t much, but it was enough. I could visualize the woman – her short, stylishly cut hair in some perfect honey shade, her mellow voice, her skin tan and just beginning to show her fourty years. I knew the narrator; a sort of stock character out of my head – big, road-worn, a bit taciturn, and with dark secrets in his past. I knew how they wound up together, and where they were (her bed, with late afternoon sun through expensive curtains, fading light on sex-tossed covers the color of caramel. I had her entire house in my head, her colors, her expensive, understated taste. I even knew what car was parked (somewhat crookedly, like she’d been in a hurry) in the carport beside her house.

I knew the conversation, up until he opens his mouth, pauses, and then begins to tell her his story. And then it ran out. I didn’t know what the story was. Or to be more specific, while I knew what story he’d tell her, I didn’t know what THIS story was, that I was telling.

I wrote it down, and saved it. A small victory; the first bit of fiction that’s gotten all the way out of my head and onto (virtual) paper in more months than I can remember.

But it’s been that way every night. Last night, a pair of characters wandered into my head and tried to talk to me. A female young traveler, and the mate of some craft, making a lonely traverse. I don’t know if this was a ship crossing bodies of water, or some spaceship crossing unimaginable gulfs, or an airship in some steampunk past-future. But I could hear her voice, and hear him tell her how everyone else on the ship slept, his low rank leaving him on the bridge.

They never got to the point where it became a story; just a setting, faces, emotions (pride, loneliness) and an physical environment of cold and isolation.

Today, I tried to write a bit of that down, but I had nothing. I couldn’t summon the scene, merely it’s description. Like all the veins of creativity I’ve encountered between sleep and wake, it was small, and not found again once lost.

Inspiration, for me, is profoundly elusive. I have never found a way to turn it on, and so often find it slipping. The muse of distraction speaks more loudly, always, than that of creation. But at least I begin to hear those whispers. I’ve missed the voice of creative inspiration.