MINNOWS

Writing is undertaken to express something fleeting that's trying to escape being caught in words. It is hereditary, like being able to throw a football straight, and from there a matter of practice. It's mysterious. The receiver wants to catch the ball, but pursuers try to knock it off course. Where to throw the ball is not exactly known until it's time to let fly. Words appear when least expected, often going another way than planned. I think the quarterback would privately admit he's crazy as hell.

Reading is studying the record of past games. Not just football but chess, music, painting and photography, colored chalk on a sidewalk, spray paint on a sound wall, a puddle of urine in an alleyway, mathematics, conversation amongst cars at the 5-Spot. Gargoyles oversee it all.

Dissonance, eye-ache colors, catch phrase back rhythms of cheap surprise are wage earners for advertisers. Self-fulfilling prophesies, antidotes of aspirin and opiates, the realms of commercial fantasy become flaccid.

Writing is what's left when all of that, and reading, are done.

A gift for fingernail painting or chopping wood, cooking home made chili or writing software for the space station, whatever grows well as a volunteer is what I like to read about. Describing it or conjuring something straight up from scratch ignores time and distance as though not really existing, which is the truth. Principally language itself is words caught on the fly, jostling in for the play. They can be convinced to switch sides, wear different jerseys, run up into the stands and snatch the mike from the announcer and sing an ad lib anthem even before there's a band on the field.

And you have a unique heredity that may, by bumping into this, somehow resonate. When sitting out in a field, what longing for dandelion wine? But ah, the words taste good, don't they?

How would I know, in this space? I know. In the vastness of not reading, escaped words have nowhere else to go. Nothing and nowhere is so full that differentiation is a joke, and I am laughing. I don't know.