June Midnight, Light

It was cold though it was June. I watched the sun set over a soccer field and a man playing fetch with his German Shepherd. I was reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac for the first time -- well, that wasn't true, I had only read the introduction. I kept adjusting myself; the rock I was sitting on did not provide the comfort I sought. Less than a year ago I had sat by this very rock and drank shots of sourpuss late into the night and then stumbled down the hill, spinning in circles and rolling in sand.

It was the introduction of On the Road that made me feel like writing. I hadn't even read Kerouac yet and I wanted to smoke something or get drunk and wander the streets downtown. I hadn't even read Kerouac and I wanted to be Elliott Smith. Or Conor Oberst, who seemed to be a mixture of them both, an eternal wanderer and a singer songwriter. All of them inebriated somehow, or at least in my mind.

But I couldn't shake the urge of wanting to write, wanting to create. Poems weren't doing it anymore, they felt too easy as if anything written with weird spacing could become poetry. I thought of distant characters I had created before now, 'great' novels started and never finished. Maybe it was the lack of plan or structure or just idea in general. Or inspiration. I wanted to draw on my own experiences, but searching inside myself I found none I deemed worthy of writing about. I'd been in this place many times before but also before jumping into the 'experience' I narrated it first and then the moment passed. My inhibitions got in the way. I imagined it was my glasses, because how could you do anything with glasses on? They were cumbersome, a physical manifestation of my excuse, my fear of participating.

I was attracted by sounds from the baseball field. I wandered in the direction of the noise; little boys yelling, parents yelling, the sound of metal hitting a ball, the stomping of ground beneath my and their feet. I wandered to the baseball field in a straight line.