Letters From Little Rock

I stayed in all day, feeling low and mean. My day-job, which is actually a night-job, went a little crazy towards the holiday season last year. I work for a corporate aircraft completions center (the planes fly to us plain-Jane and are supposed to leave as luxury jets) and our schedule was pretty much ten hours per day during the week and eights on Saturdays and Sundays for the last two months of the year. Needless to say, I’m not the sort that likes having his routine affected in that way. One of the reasons I quit my warehouse job several years back was to get away from nonsensical working conditions.
Corporate jets just seemed like they couldn’t help but be built in a more professional environment, and by and large they are, but the last two months have been pretty basic business 101 affairs. You know what I mean; “If one man can do a job in 40 hours, can forty men do the same job in one hour?” The answer is pretty obvious, but we kept running the experiment just to make sure. Luckily, I work in one of the few industries where there is still some competition for employees. It’s our custom to shut down for two weeks at Christmas. There was some danger of not getting that break this year. I must say I’m just as spoiled as the rest of my co-workers because I felt pretty much entitled to it and pretty hacked-off that we might not get it. I did remind myself from time to time that when I worked my warehouse job I had to work Thanksgiving and Christmas day more than once. Luckily, the magic number was reached and we did in fact get our time off for the holidays. But I still don’t feel like I’ve had a day off since about last November.

I can’t say that the work is so stressful or that my life is either, but sometimes the creative bug begins to grow and metamorphose and you become somewhat anxious about the end result; begin to wonder whether there is a butterfly or a hopeful monster lurking in your future.

I’ve been going through some slow process of evolution as a writer and I know I’m on the cusp of something substantially different than what I’ve written before. Of course, we all grow and change—that’s not unique to those of us who have a creative streak—but sometimes a change in style or voice can be a little trying while you’re still finding your way. The endless days of overtime held me in a painful state of suspended animation, certain I had new wings but unable to test them. Even during shut-down I couldn’t seem to get back on schedule and only half-heartedly made the attempt to write. It’s difficult for me to adapt to fluctuations in my schedule and it’s only with difficulty that I even sat down to edit what I hope will be my next collection of poetry, a sequence of some five-hundred or so haiku forming a loose narrative. It will be more-or-less the diary of a year with a strong taste of the seasons as is customary with haiku. I hope to have more news about that soon. I spent several days during shut-down trying to find a better deal than 1stBooks.Com currently offers and it looks like I might self-publish through Lightning Source next time. I’m not sure when I will have a definite announcement to make on that account as during the editing of my book I discovered that there was some imbalance in the final structure and to correct this I really should write another twenty-five or so haiku just to flesh out certain ideas I want to give proper exposure. That is the crux of yesterday’s miserable feeling. Most of the haiku—practically all of them—were written last year and prompted what I feel is the current change of direction in my poetry. But I’m not certain I won’t be strangling the changeling in its crib if I stop myself from exploring the bounds of these new rhythms and voicings to go back and complete last year’s thought. Still, this sequence of haiku is important to me for a number of reasons I won’t go into, and if I don’t bring it to its full realization, I’m quite certain I will regret it one day.
Of course, I’m going to try to finish off the thing with as much grace and panache as I can, and no small amount of affection, but the difficulty is real, though surmountable. It reminds me of when I was in school and quite certain I would one day make my living as a cartoonist. Every summer I would see my skills grow and change and then have to endure the nine months of stagnation and atrophy we call high school. It used to take me a couple of weeks at the beginning of every summer to get back to where I was the previous fall when school interrupted. Compounding my frustration, then and now, is the fact that October through December is my most fertile period. Don’t ask me why, I don’t really know, but just like there are morning-people and night-people, I’ve always been at my best in the fall. I like everything about it, from autumn leaves to Halloween to peace and goodwill to my fellow man. Actually, I think it’s my life-long curse of procrastination that makes me feel fall is so productive. In my early twenties I always added up the total number of poems I wrote every year as though it somehow mattered and inevitably somewhere along about September I would go into a state of deep depression about my lack of production for the year and somehow or another turn out most of my work for the year during those last few months. I know it’s silly to add up poems like so many bushels of peas, but at the time I was trying to prove something to myself (showing off in front of god, I think they call it) and having something to show for my effort was a vital part of living with myself. I guess that is the reason the timing of the current change of style has been so stressful to me. Thinking about it, it occurs to me that there have been many watershed years for me as a writer. In fact, every few years I find myself looking back and saying, “You know, that is the year I really started to get the hang of it.” I’m sure I’ll look back one day and realize I didn’t get the hang of it until someday that’s still a long ways off.

Now there’s a comforting thought for a winter’s night.