Putting my mind in time out...

In the beginning, you only needed 
your head, a moon swimming in space, 
and four bare branches; 
and when your body was added, 
it was light and thin at first, 
not yet the dark chapel 
from which, later, you tried to escape.  
You lived in a non-Newtonian world, 
your arms grew up from your shoulders, 
your feet did not touch the ground, 
your hair was streaming, 
you were still flying.

Lisel Mueller


Tonight I watched The Banger Sisters.  It was supposed to be background noise to my many chores but instead it reached in and twisted my insides.  It's your typical predictable, good-hearted comedy that pairs one free-spirit with one, actually 5, uptight suburbanites and an OCD writer, culminating with everyone being a better person.  But myself being a person who can derive meaning from a pickle, it said something to me, specifically Geoffrey Rush's character of the writer.  It brought me back to a space within myself that has been compressed to the point of near invisibility.  I revisited it in my car yesterday when I was blasting No One Else on Earth and belting it all down the road.  Usually I'm at one with it as the wind rushes past me on my bike.  Other than that, that particular sense of freedom eludes me.  I am almost never without my sidekick, Mr. Should.  Should I be blasting my music?  9 times out of 9 the answer is no.  The people around me might get mad, or a baby might be sleeping in the car next to me.  Should I be riding my bike?  No, I should be reading, or writing, or cleaning, or doing emails.  I never noticed until tonight the extreme extent to which this word is infused into my every thought and tied to my every action.  It's disgusting.

I had planned to come home and write all night.  But for whatever reason I decided to start inputting all my old cds into my itunes.  That is what I wanted to do.  And, for a moment there I flashed back to what it felt like to be a second-grade teacher of a class full of unruly children.  You're trying to work on something, as one kid is yelling, "Teacher, she's doing something she's not supposed to" and another is screaming, "Teacher, she's not following the rules".  Meanwhile, two others are over there arguing and calling each other names.  "Stupid!"  "Lazy!"  I finally had to pipe up and scream, "Enough already!"  If I want to input music, that's what I'm damn well gonna do!  And then I put all the voices in my head in time out. 

So now my goal is to do whatever it is I want to do.  If that's write, then I'll write.  If it's not, I am no longer allowed to beat myself up about it.  If I want to clean, I'll clean.  But if not, I will learn to live with the mess.  If I want to blast old country songs while sitting in traffic, then that is what I'm going to do and the people around me will just have to learn to love Billy Ray Cyrus too.