  I thought I only wanted to read tonight. But as I sat down on the leather recliner with my book, I yearned for something to add to the experience. I need to speak of what Im connecting with. This book this book is coming through me with as much knowing as I can imagine. Theres this true and powerful identification occurring inside, connecting with the authors characterization of ms. Woolf. I feel my own inner world being described. A sense of unity with this woman, this writer immersed in the out-of-body experience of creation.
I know I am a writer. It is my calling, my passion, the space where I feel most satisfied. Like my talents as a soccer player, I slip into this zone of being. I dont just play the game, I am the game. I lose myself, create plays, defy my own expectations of my skill. I become the game, wholly and without doubt. I feel this way when I write. I write because I have to. As much as I require to eat and breath and lust for sex, I must write to complete my world. I am at peace before the computer, thinking without effort as my fingers move without conscious intention about the keyboard.
Its more than an extension of me. It is me. The pragmatist interrupts here for a moment. There will come a time when I will need to parlay this into making a living for myself. I have no designs to marry well, to afford myself the luxury of being supported financially by another. I have rich parents. This is essential at this stage of my life. But this cannot last. I need to pull free of the bonds of financial dependence.
I need this to further my capacity to write, not just for my emotional development. This kind of writing this confessional brand of writing this is my comfort zone. Not fiction, not analytical essays. Although I can manage alright within the spheres of both. No where does this flavour of writing enter into the capitalist scheme? How can I transcribe my words into marketable fodder? To be financially dubious means a risk to my life alone. I need this space apart from human interruption.
I wont always have this place of my own, safely isolated from disturbance and all the risks associated with interpersonal interaction. Not unless I buy this place from my folks. And thats going to take some pragmatic doing. I want for my aunt to read this book. Paula go buy Cunninghams novel, The Hours. It won the Pulitzer for a reason. Its remarkably written, so acutely insightful into the minds of three women living at different times but with paralleling complications due to their respective social limitations. They embody shades of the same woman, transcendent of historical timelines. Its brilliant, and Im only 40 pages into it. Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The Clash is singing Lost in a Supermarket on the stereo downstairs, and Im reminded of the pensive poem of Alan Ginsberg. Im always thinking of that poem. For years, it comes into my head on a weekly basis. Something will trigger it.
Like this book, it speaks for me. I roll it around in my mouth, attentive to the flavour it releases. This space I find myself in this evening. Before the medication, I would be manic with it. The sheer energy of transcendent connection would envelop me, swallow me whole, drown me in emotion too powerful for my single self to contain. But instead instead I can be with it, experience it and honour it. Its not going to destroy me.
this night like so many before it and so many more to come this is being alive. The extremes are not frightening, that threat promised when an undertow would present itself. An undertow to take me deep into depression or the flip side when I would feel unable to stop the mania overtaking me. where exalted transcendence would separate me from myself. Either way, the break from reality the uncontrolled push and pull by invisible forces.
Eleven pills a day. Somehow the chemical assistancethank god Ive found some balance. And further, that I can still find the zone without the terrifying abandon to strange energies. Mays dark, complicated beats downstairs. The music is inside of me tonight. With each selection picked at random by my player, I shift shapes into nostalgic reverie or dampened weight. The aperture of the soul is cranked wide open tonight, inviting all that presents itself an unadulterated opportunity to affect me.
But its safe. There is no one here to threaten the indulgence of feeling. There is no doom on the horizon to cause me worry that the darkness will disguise my better judgment. No super-caliber light to blind my ocular connection to the ground beneath me. Talking about mental illness is difficult if youre not in my body, I imagine. Do I do it justice to try to describe it? Ive only recently begun to acknowledge that an illness haunts me. Ive always been a bit off. Thought it idiosyncratic or eccentric but never a bonefide chemical imbalance.
Then again, with all the narcotics Ive used in my time they warn you of the potential to bring a susceptibility to the surface when you abuse hard drugs. Did I bring this on myself? Or did I use them to deal with the disease before I recognized what it is? Crystal gave me consistency of feeling. I knew exactly the trajectory of the high as measured by my intake.
I knew exactly how hard Id fall when all the elation evaporated. Marijuana was a godsend the way it balanced me into a state of continual paranoia and paralysis. I invented my own bubble of anxiety to live in. Now its just alcohol. My mistress. Kept in the cupboard for days, and then she emerges full of light and life. A promise of abandon from my better judgment. An allowance of moral freedom. A vacation from my path, is what it is. Kept in check, its harmless. So long I continue to realize the larger compromises accepted by indulging in it. Neko is on the stereo now downstairs. I think its time to disengage the writer and engage the base animal lust for impassioned song. 
