The Right Write Rite

Morning

pages are

rather late today. I'm in a funk over idiots.

I should have started morning pages as soon as I

woke up. Oh well. Better late than never. It always shocks me--and this goes on a lot of

late--that I can be so incredibly happy one moment, then bashing my head on a counter in frustration the next. People make me so mad, but inside I'm happy regardless. It's weird to feel every emotion at once, and so deeply.

childhood, stepping along barefoot, hot blacktop burning my toes. The ice cream man is outside my house. Faded t-shirts, sandals, everything dusty because it's the desert. But in the city there are trees, and a river that sometimes rises over its bed of skipper stones. Everything by the gray water smells like trout, everywhere else smells like airborne dust. Downtown, the dust is cigarette ash, and always tar, on reconstructed streets. Lights flash on pedestals, lining the roofs and walls and doors. overhead, dingy signs blaze to hide their dirt, and everyone believes in their romance.
The rest of us know better.

But travel, always new things moving, quietly in the background as we traverse in fore with our thoughts, those are memories. They remind us we lived, and the more we dwell on what was, the more it shines to cover what is, the two become overlaid, colors shading each other, and a new one emerges in the center. You don't notice until you focus on the edge of your sphere, then return with eyes accustomed to the sharp edge. For a moment, the center's edge is apparent, then the two of past and present merge, and become one, and the center dominates.