Table and Keys, Please

Hopper.  One hour precisely to write.  We all as students and writers, and just regular characters should time ourselves.  One hour of time for US.  To focus on something we love— building our business, drawing, running, fishing, walk in the park or around the neighborhood, reading.  Something.  And just for you.  I’ve found over the past three or so years that time that is entirely mine is more a matter of survival than it is simply to maintain sanity.  My wife, nonstop this morning with feeding Emma and getting ready for work, coordinating certain specifics with Emma sick, with her mother.  Then, she dashes to work, to teach little jittery and impatient and altogether difficult-to-steer 2nd and 3rd graders.  ZERO time to her.  Just texted her while waiting for breakfast sandwich and 4-shot mocha that she should attempt some solo minutes when I get home this evening.  It’s survival.  And yes, sanity.  But if you’re not sane, you’re not surviving… and conversely, barely surviving will hook you into a detrimental madness.

This morning, here, me mad with my types, further educating my Self on my path, what I’m to acquire and actually, tangibly touch and work and live within, here in ’17.  Semester starts in one week.  One week from today and I’m more than ready with this one class.  Taking off into the semester with mad positivity and NOT looking back.  Just after Spring ’15 ended, one of my most enigmatic and creative, proverbially brilliant, students told me I should lecture at her university, on Kerouac and Plath, Hunter and Shakur.  Just what I’m trying to do, believe me.  Notes prepared already for first lecture, which will only at the end introduce Hunter.  We’ll be looking for notes and echoes of Freedom in the works of our authors, and explore the idea, organically at first (meaning, tied to no text), as to why all Humans want to be free above anything.  It’s the most primal, intrinsic, and pre-written pursuit, hankering.  It’s certainly mine.  Freedom financially, socially, from even certain personality parcels of myself.  Faster on the keys, this current Self.

Here at Hopper, others are on laptops, on phones, rushing to work, on their way to drop off kids and maybe fill car with gas.  Will they get time to themselves, as I am now?  Feel cold or something expanding in my circuitry and general feel, but I won’t let it wallop this sovereignty.  I retaliate with stubbornness, adoration of this sitting, here at the larger table with my now-functioning laptop, open Comp Book, mocha and breakfast.  The hour now significantly eroded, filed down by its own numerics.  “Write faster,” I tell myself.  People make their way to this nook of the shop and see me here working and roll their eyes, “Ugh…” they think, but I don’t care.  This is my time and I have writing to do, a semester to prep for, a novel to read again—  Assume HST’s character and just ride, go faster,  not worrying about pond ripples.  Not yet.  This is my table, for now, and they can frown all they want.  I’m ignoring, I’m sipping the mocha faster which precipitates like the rain outside, harder and with more intention and carelessness.  Wouldn’t say I’m careless, I just don’t care about anything right now but this sitting, this time to ME.