THE SENTENCE
ON MENTAL HEALTH & REVOLT
Poetry is for the people.
—Texas Poet Laureate Amanda Johnston
My journey back to health is long and boring. I offer my story for my own well being and in service to sufferers of depression, addicts and survivors everywhere who feel debilitated with a crippling rage.
We’ll get there as long as we keep telling it to whoever does or doesn’t want to hear. We’ll find ourselves in community, if not healed then on the street and holding a camera and yelling about it.
My personal journalism will exist behind a paywall now but you’ll have a chance to read these essays when they’re published in book form. The poetry is free as long as you want it.
Crucially, your readership makes all this possible. By opening these mailers you are keeping me alive.
The following is a preview of “THE SENTENCE,” January’s monthly essay at Pissing In The Press Pool.
Writing is hard. Starting is the can be the hardest thing about writing. The uncertainty of the unknown, and danger of the subconscious, can keep me at bay. Once I’ve began it flows, in torrents I will be indisposed with until I’ve said what I need to say. As best I can and as time allows. Speaking of time, perhaps capitalism has something to do with it (and of course it does) but beyond the worldly concerns of the clock on the wall, the telephone or the meter man, as a writer:
a) I don’t really know what I’m going to say.
b) I know that whatever it is it’ll be a doozy (if I’m doing it right) and it’ll demand that the world stop til it’s done.
Try telling that to your boss or parents, friends and loved ones. “Oh I need to go do something. I’m not sure what it is but it’ll take precedence over everything else.”
Right. Don’t say that. Just say “writing,” or rot-in as Jennifer Pinkley calls it and thank the gods for people that tolerate you. It’s always a struggle, as the great Mark Furman once told me, but I think my trouble over the last couple-two-tree years was I’ve been avoiding writing the next two sentences I’m about to…[cont. behind paywall]
