I’ve been writing a lot lately. None of it has ended up here. People seem to like my writing. When I share my business card with some person or another, so that they can look at my art, they often comment first on how they enjoyed this section, of rambling thoughts. It makes me think I should be a writer. I’ve had a lot of interesting experiences and one night, while sitting tucked away on the corner stool of a diner some time back, I resolved to write a book about them. Perhaps as a function of caffeine, of which I had been partaking heavily, I felt distractable and uninspired while staring blindly at my little over-priced composition pad. I recently heard Janet Mock speak at the Director’s Guild. She’s a fairly remarkable person. I would recommend learning more about her life. Anyway, she shared a piece of advise which, in a moment of rare clarity, I was able to operationalize, right there in the diner, in front of my watery coffee. She wrote her first book in large part by, in her words, gifting herself an hour each day to write. I also thought about some other advice that I had once received from a co-worker a long time ago. “It doesn’t have to be done well; it just has to be done,” he said, referring to our nightly cleaning chores. I had apparently been taking too long to complete them, in the interest of being thorough.
So it occurred to me that I could combine these two bit of advise and gift myself with an hour of crappy writing daily. The main parts seemed to be the hour and the getting done. Free from any requirement of quality, and with newfound permission to spend an hour so casually, I wrote. Anything went so long as I followed the simple rules: Stuff should be written down in an hour dedicated to the task (and usually stolen from some other duty). So clean clothes gave way to phrases such as, “shut the fuck up, you coin-operated pony.” I stole the coin operated pony line from a friend of mine, the extremely talented artist Walter Schrank. Plagiarism wasn’t against the rules, so it passed muster (sorry Walter! If you, gentle reader, would care to read more of Walter’s beautiful verse, do visit SoHo Artist Materials on Crosby or visit www.walterschrank.com and buy a copy of his collection called “small barbarisms”). Eating breakfast was replaced with margin notes like, “finger poo,” and “tinkle troll.” Pretty soon, I had accumulated enough work that I began to feel the need to share. I transcribed the verse “45% sane” on note cards attached to tissue packets and laid them silently around on the seats of subway cars during the evening comunte. Perhaps I should have done so with “tinkle troll” instead? I do so like the sound of that one. Did you know that dental crowns these days are made of Zirconium, which is white powdered metal? I wrote that line. It happens to be true. Eventually these scriblings began to coalesce into a series of vignettes which I’ve started calling “Sullivan Street,” after the first one. Most of them are loosely, but more or less, based in reality. Since they’ve all been extracted from a single thread, I wonder if it wouldn’t be too difficult to stitch them back together again, once they have been embellished and tumbled smooth. That would be nice.