And So This is Fifty
And what have you done? Life begins at, with, and because of fire.
Note: Don’t like reading? I will read it to you here.🫡
This is fifty.
It wheels its little cart from the edge of my incredulity and into full view, the rickety wooden wheels telegraphing the true burden of its load. The load it bears is me, of course. Of my life so far. This little heap of filthy laundry, multicolored, and comprised of fabrics of dubious origin and quality. These garments, soaked through with life and stitched with the familiar, bear the stench of who I have become over time.
Is that all there is? I thought the pile would be bigger.
My brain is on fire. It screams for more oxygen, more fuel, more heat. It toddler-tantrums for more kerosene, as though the yield of fifty years drilling the creative crust of my earth is not nearly enough juice to sustain this blaze. This fire needs to be bigger, hotter. More words, more music, more work, more…stink.
This is fifty.
The green numbers on the clock blink at me. I blink back. It’s 2 AM and an ember is hot and melting all the Tupperware lids of my brain. A dream incantation—a line that means nothing—is setting off proximity alarms. Sleep intruder alert! I blearily, wearily, and knowingly mash my thumb to the microphone button on my phone and speak the line into existence. When I read this tomorrow, it will mean nothing. Or will it? I will write it on a Post-It and put it on the corkboard. Stare at it. Thinking, one day that line will burn down a whole town. That line. That line. That line.
Why do you write them down, idiot? No one will ever read them. The flames lick, the crackle snaps, I unpack my marshmallows for the brain conflagration. It’s just the way it is.
My dreams are bad lately.
What if The Dementia claims me as it did my mother, dragging me from the shore of this reality beach to the dark ocean of nothing? Stealing my words. Taking my expression. I must act now! Time is running out! Don’t delay! This offer won’t last! All things must go! We must throw all the furniture on the fire and wait to dig through the smoldering ashes. This is what it is—to be forever slightly mad. On the edge of. A desk of a mess of a display case on show. I must write it all down before it all goes away.
This is fifty.
And my brain is on fire.
This chair is cheap. It is from IKEA and the pleather is sloughing off like desiccating skin. But it knows its role in this play. It growls like a fed bear is a dead bear grizzly from behind my desk, jaws hungry for my arse. Have you seen the price of an Aeron chair? It’s ridiculous, even on sale, but it doesn’t stop the creative corpse lashed to my witches’ stake shouting gibberish from the pyre:
“The chair holds the key!”
The PostureFit SL back support, the Harmonic Tilt, the chest open, shoulders back of it—yes! It is the key to sitting at the desk and doing the work and getting it done. Six months ago, it was the corkboard. “The corkboard is the key! You cannot move forward without one!” Next month it’ll be a felt mat for my desk. Or a monitor stand.
There are no keys because there are no doors. There is only fire and the kindling at my feet.
Fingers moving on a keyboard. PaperMate Flair MEDIUM scribbling on 70 G/M². These are bellows to the mind. All around me, shambles. My brain splayed and naked all over my desk. I inspect it with cool detachment. I will go back to the Pilot G2 eventually, but for now, if it bleeds it reads. My fingertips are smudged grey with ink as I blow on the pages.
Ideas come through turnstiles and I draft them like sheep. Good. Bad. Needs shearing. In the field of dreams, I chase one down and tackle it roughly before tying twine around its skinny ankles. Four seconds! That’s a record. When I remove my knee from its neck, I see that it’s not mine and cut the string with a sigh. Go, little one. Go find your rest with a better shepherd.
Wait. The cinematographer is changing lenses.
This is fifty.
Everything looks softer. I cry at the drop of a hat. Hats, when they land, can be very poetic it seems. Dramatic. Sad. Some days the sky is so clear and blue it makes me ache. Some days I play the same song over and over and over. Some days I just can’t find my glasses and squint at words all day long.
I am an untrained idea pilot in a plane with belligerent landing gear. I glide my Cessna in on a short beach and only lose one wing. “Not a single lesson!” I yell, jumping from the flaming wreckage while jotting down loose notes. I file them away for another day. What’s the point of all these acrobatics? These aerials and loop-de-loops and falling leaf stalls?
I have the consumption, inhaling more books, more film, more music, and coughing with it. This sense of time running out is tickling the feet of my days. Focus is elusive and despite making a ‘one book at a time’ rule I have four on the go. Too many books, not enough +1.50 readers. I eat music. All movies seem orange these days. Why is that? I am swept up and desaturated, my soundtrack swells and echoes. I am prone to self-sabotage but they cannot take my pencils. They cannot douse my mind. They cannot take my freeeeeedom! Ugh.
My brain is on fire.
My heart slips its moorings.
My proof of Spirit is pure rocket fuel.
This is fifty.
Why are you still writing your stupid little notes in your stupid little books in your stupid little handwriting? For your eyes only books with your heart only dreams and your time wasted pages. Why are you bothering? When you are dead—and you will be dead—no one will know what they mean, and who do you think will be looking at them, anyway? There is no archivist coming in to document this shit. Your voice will die with you, shut between these pages as custom-made fire starters that have taken years to compress.
I can’t stop.
My brain is on fire.
Fifty years of fires and lightning and electrical storms and tornados and disasters inside. Houses with roofs ripped off. Charred ruins and melted curtains. A cow picked up and flung across my horizon, its soft eyes gazing into mine as if to say, “Why did you do this to me? I was just enjoying the grass?”
Why? Why? Why?
It’s just…
“What are you running away from?”
It’s a comment I sometimes get about how much I ride my bike and while I laugh when I hear it, I will confess I don’t understand it at all. You don’t ask the omelet maker why they’re cracking eggs, do you? But it occurs to me now that riding and writing are very similar and it’s best not to look too closely at motivations for either. Sometimes things just are because they are.
What am I running away from?
I am not running away from anything.
I am running towards it.
I am running toward the infinite of the never-get-there. I am running with my whole body in flames and my brain flinging matches at the underbrush. I am a soft-centered log with a long-burning shell rolling willingly into the coals. Words, meaning, life—they drift toward my inferno and evaporate POOF! like tissue paper in the Bunsen burner of my dreams. I am orange and bright and incandescent. I’m crackling and snapping my bark off in large, flaming chunks. Forever in the furnace, I run, I run, I run, laughing with the riotous cackle of an unrepentant witch.
This is fifty.
And I am absolutely burning.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen1
This week’s amends…
My Career
So little to say
So urgent
to say it
- Leonard Cohen
Via the Pome newsletter (Short modern poems for your inbox)
Song Exploder episode on how John Lennon wrote the song “God.” Lots of audio from John talking about it - where “God is a concept by which we measure our pain” came from - and peeps who played in the session. I could listen to musicians talk about where things come from, forever.
Via Austin Kleon
Looking forward to this one.
Via Open Culture
I don’t ski. These ten minutes of ‘Whoa’ is enough to fill my cup. Enjoy some free-skiing craziness with Markus Eder and The Ultimate Run. Here’s a vid on how they did various setups for it.
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?
Ten years from now, I will copy and paste this post and change the fifty to sixty. I plan to burn for a bloody long time!
Great stuff, Janeen. Thank you.
Happy belated birthday wishes 😘 Loving your content! Inspiring me to start putting the pen to paper again. Hope all is well and you had a special day xxx