*I'd like to introduce a ballad into the set-list of the blog. It's an oldie, a prose translation assigned in a Poetry class I took in a different lifetime. The inspiration is a poem by an incredible author named Raymond Carver. His cigarette has long been snuffed, but his smoke continues to rise from the ashtray.
From writing I have learned to battle the tedium of a Sunday Night. I catch stale things and make them scream, dragging them into the light. I prefer it when inspiration finds me, but I can also bend it to my will.
The rain splatters lazily against the window, tapping a cadence like a jazz drummer fighting sedation.
Defeated on the couch, I watch the cinder of my cigarette expand to a flimsy length. Not ten feet from this couch rests an old ceramic ashtray atop a dusty nightstand. For a second, I glare at it, my fingers spread open—beckoning—arm outstretched, channeling in vain a Jedi’s telekinetic retrieval trick. On Sunday nights, anything outside of an arms-length away makes you desperate for superhuman powers. The shackles of comfort.
Overhead, the floorboards vibrate in my daughter’s room, muffling the crunch coming from her stereo. Every last wooden squeak piques my paranoia.
I consider the gray mini-van ticking in the driveway, its siding paneled like an Irish living room, and that coveted red Ferrari idling somewhere past the next horizon.
I’m jarred from that thought by noise in the noise. It’s the sound of a glass stacked at the top of a fragile mound in the sink. Ice cubes and impaled olives weigh it down. It shrieks its way to the base of the pyramid. Glasses scatter like bowling pins. My wife backpedals, grinning impishly. She holds an unsteady finger to her lips and whispers “sshh” to no one in particular.
So there. It’s all useful in some way. Nothing is trivial. I’m grateful for this. I need all these things to fill the void.
