Not Too Soon

Hi, how are you? It's late here, very dark. It's the kind of moment that when you blog makes you feel as if no one will ever read it, so you could write anything and it wouldn't matter, but of course this is both true and not true. More people will read it than you think, and less than you want. But this is just true for all writers. For me one great thing about meeting so many writers at this point in my life is discovering that there is no amount of fame and success that will make  you a secure, emotionally whole human being who doesn't need some kind of attention if you don't enter the game like that already.

A lot of the trick to being a writer is being able to survive what your ego thinks ought to be happening for you. And remembering to write as if no will ever read it and so you could say anything. Because it will matter, both more and less than you want it to, and the only protection you have is to engage with it as a free person.

I've been listening to this song about ten times tonight. I remember I used to listen to the album—The Throwing Muses' Real Ramona—when I lived in San Francisco. It was my personal soundtrack. I was just out of college, working at a bookstore in the Castro, I had a motorcycle I rode when I wasn't walking everywhere. I wanted to be a writer but I didn't know how else to do it except to go to cafes and write in my notebooks. I wanted to do something daring and profane and beautiful. It felt like the end of the world. We were at war. George Bush the senior, the one we'd come to think of as "the first" was president and it felt like the world was going to end, so, why not do something truly beautiful and sacrilegious? It was impossible to imagine then it would be worse. That he would have a son who would look like him but sound like a less educated, less intelligent, less compassionate version of him, as alike him as a donkey is to a mule. The son a bad dream about the father that went on for 8 years.

Sometimes I think about being in a yoga class in the late 90s, and the teacher saying "Yoga is meant to help us endure the Kaliyuga, the worst of times, the era we are entering." If, after getting up after that class, you'd said to me, "You'll remember that remark for at least a decade", I would have laughed.

I made the joke recently that the above video was my screen memory for the 80s. It almost is. Watching the video I can feel the 80s somewhere, but in fact the album dates to 1991.

I have a theory about apocalypses. That they are negative fantasies. That we think about them, imagine them, because it relieves us of responsibility. It appeals to the part of us that relishes horror, that luxuriates in paralysis. Back then I was reading Galeano's Memory of Fire and it was blowing my mind. Here is another thought I've had for decades: the story in that book, of the town waiting for the end of the world and then it didn't happen. And there's a line I remember, about how the end of the century often brought with it the idea that the world would end.

So we are approaching an announced apocalypse again, this time 2012 per the Mayan Calendar, and at the same time we have the lovely fundamentalist Christians who are trying to rush the end times, to make the predictions come true—and who scoff at the idea that we even need to take care of the planet, because after the return of the Lord, those who are taken won't be here anymore and they are the ones that matter, per their beliefs.

And I'm no preacher, but I think, if Jesus is real, if he really is the Messiah and the Christ… do you really think you can get him to hurry back?

I think if you think you know God, you don't know God.