Singing With the Dead

 Except for the random walks and a short trip out with a friend, I’ve spent most of the past two weeks hunkered over the laptop or my notebook (paper – they still make those). I’ve squeezed out a little over a hundred and twenty pages in the last month and a half. Plus done a revision (more like a complete overhaul) of a short story I wrote several years back. I’m writing again. It’s like the blood just started pumping through my veins. I am among the living again. It feels good.

The downside to this is that, well . . . I am among the living again. Before, my zombie corpse was overwhelmed by the fact that, you know, I was dead. Now, as the blood starts moving through, I feel it moving through. I feel every little pain, every ache. Too much metaphor?

Anyway, I am using this regeneration to do what I’m supposed to do in this world, what I do best. One hundred and twenty pages worth. The more I write, the more confident I become. And not just on the page, but in everything else. I assert myself on the page, and life just follows.

Others are still giving me advice. Talking. Telling me what I should do. Find a job. Make lots of money. Get a car. Move here. Move there. Don’t move at all. Change this or that or all of it. Stop being who you are. I know they are trying to be helpful (and I did seem pretty helpless there for a while), and it’s not that I don’t appreciate the help – at least the thought behind the help – but I don’t want it. I’ve stopped listening.

They exhaust me. Droning on and on. I tire of trying to convince them of the universal value of art, even as we sit watching television or listening to a band play. As if it’s somehow okay for other people to be artists, yet it’s beneath me. As if my higher calling is earning seventy-five grand a year and driving a glorified station wagon back to my house in the suburbs where I can watch art made by other people on my big screen tv, just to unwind from selling all those widgets and earning all that money. And doing it again tomorrow.

I don’t want to explain myself anymore. And I’m not going to. Okay, maybe here on the page. I’m just going to keep going. Pour as much of myself into writing as they do into their trinket-earning. If I can’t make a living at it, well I’ll find something to pay the bills, but if I never try, if I never put my art first, how will I know?

One hundred twenty pages. And I'm not a zombie.