the hiatus: or, what I did on my summer vacation

It is not my habit to comment on my photos but it is my habit that they are usually a springboard for my writing. Sometimes I have an inkling and then I dig around and find one that seems to suit the thought and off I go. It does seem a bit like cheating: the writing comes easy this way. Not that I write about the photo but that it illuminates something lurking in my mind, and once I see it the words seem to rise and waver out of nowhere, and all I have to do is chase after them. It can be said that this is a gift and if you know anyone who writes or endeavors to write or even is paid a lot of money to write, they will tell you that writing in and of itself is a dreadful, tedious, and excruciating process, a self-crucifixtion, an autopsy where you wield the scalpel (on a good day) and on a bad, the chain saw, and on your very self. It can be like this: you stand there with many people pushing you forward, one of them maybe your beloved, or maybe that nice English teacher you had in the seventh grade or maybe Mr. You Need to Pay the Rent Right Now. As the writer you are both the executioner and the only person in the word who holds the key to redemption in their itty bitty hands.

This photo I am calling Crazy Quilt Stitched with Razor Wire. No wait, maybe it should be Room With a View. It is what I did on my summer vacation from writing, when the noose was no less loose (oh hell has it been that long) yet I had nothing to say. No wait, I always have something to say, many somethings and variations on even all that. Correction: sometime in July I think, without really putting much thought into it I just said I wasn't going to say and see how that worked for me. An option to the platform is of course solitary confinement. Did I say an option? Really, if you are meant to write or really, if you are meant to pick beans or skate across a luminous glaze of ice in front of ten thousand people or meant to pat the baby on her back or be the one to walk the walk or whatever it is your purpose in life is, and you don't; well. As far as that story goes I am ready for the next chapter.

I took the above photo when I was, as I mentioned, on hiatus, having cleaved myself from spilling my guts onto the page because it seemed no use. Shouting down from the scaffolding, across an empty canyon, into an empty room and onto the calm before the storm of an empty page is my life's purpose but nowhere in the fine print does it say I am admonished from and prohibited therefore from earning a living thereof and from. The photo was my room with a view, while on a trip for a family wedding. That the rest of the wedding party was doing the mojitos with freshly plucked mint in the poolside cabana down the road at the luxury spa was not lost on me. The El Rancho Motel, within spitting distance from it's sister bar and the nightly buzz of police search helicopters, was not what I had in mind.

Or was it. Because here I am and like the little girlie in the cute hood and the basket full of goodies, the big bad wolf was just full of hot air (oh wait that was the pig story) but anyway, what I mean to say is that good god, you leap and then the words are like tiny links in a chain, or so you think until the flock takes flight and there you are: seeing something beyond, and past the wire and fencing, which of course would be a something you never knew.