An Eccentric
Saturday, August 2nd, 2008
The charge has finally been made. I am an “eccentric writer” who has immutable quirks in the way that he perceives and experience life. It’s hard for the people I am closest to … to “track with me.” Who I am when I speak, I’m told, is far worse off and laconic compared to the person who sits down to capture his thoughts in writing.
I announce these shortcomings with a bit of satisfaction because I know them only to be partly true and because, on some days, to be referred to as a writer even if it’s one that is enigmatic is a strong enough connection for me. The great ones are generally thought to be a bit off kilter (Kerouac, Sexton, Joyce, etc.) like train cars sitting in the pulverized railroad ground, just off the tracks.
I do not have my future mapped out as most people do and a list of hopes and dreams to come true (not written out, anyway.) I am hopeful of everything, it seems, including that my friends and neighbors are able to light as many gas grills and mow as many lawns as their suburban hearts desire. I, on the other hand, live in the moment … and other times couldn’t be further from it. When people are speaking to me, I am sometimes lost envisioning stories, creating backgrounds for the people I pass on the street and imagining what their hopes and dreams might be if I could step into their bodies.
Eccentricity has its advantages and I’ve cultivated mine to include family, dependability, comraderie, love, passion, level-headedness, compassion, warmth, realism, godliness, and pets. I write to make sense of the world and to capture it in bits and pieces before my life disappears. There is more importance in the little moments than any other and it’s important to pay attention to them even if finding the words to write about them consumes you shortly after the moment passes.
In person, I am not the analyzer I tend to be in my journal and my blog posts. That happens subliminally as my mind sorts of what matters for itself. Before the end to my own story comes, I hope to live life to its fullest, and to do it with pen in hand. One day, I’ll learn to edit out the internal editor that can cause be to so erratic and then, with even more focus, all these goals I feel so passionately about and yet am not familiar can finally be crossed off from my invisible to-do list.
