For about 2 months now, I have been saying that I am 90% finished with my first book which will be published late this year. That is, it will be published if I can friggin' finish it already! I have been working on this book for just under 2 years now. I am endlessly distracted. At first, it was the weight of post-Katrina community life. The words of social activist and Catholic worker Dorothy Day captured some of my internal conflicts during this time: “The sustained effort of writing, of putting pen to paper so many hours a day when there are human beings around who need me, when there is sickness, and hunger, and sorrow, is a harrowingly painful job. I feel that I have done nothing well. But I have done what I could." This certainly has a romantic nobility to it.
Other more mundane distractions also appear, mainly in the form of sensual pleasure (food, drink, sex), mindless and not-so-mindless entertainment (internet, tv, reading, ubiquitous New Orleans festivals), but mostly just spacing out (daydreaming of a non-existent future, worrying about deadlines long passed, wondering about the suffering of friends and family). None of these distractions is inherently bad. I like a lot of them. And even the ones I don't like (e.g. the worrying) are kind of gratifying in a twisted sort of way. All of this is just part of human life. While incessantly de-railed, one somehow keeps trying in spite of it. We humans seem to excel at this trying. It's a mysterious ability and it's one of the things that makes us beautiful.
Another poetic-like offering:
Suspended.
In the no (wo)man's land that is neither
ecstasy nor devastation
I shuffle along,
Always at home in my own dream world
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