Upstream. A Mohawk Valley Blogzine.

Sunday, May 14, 2006

Why I Blog

You wake up one morning and the light is gone. You’ve been expecting it for sometime because the candle in the alcove on the back stairway that leads up from your heart to your mind has been sputtering for several weeks, but it still takes you by surprise. And terror like you have never known chills your body and your blood, and you don’t drag yourself out of bed until noon.

Then you go to work, tearing out walls in the house you are restoring, while tears wash away plaster from your face and onto the floor. You don’t even care that big boys don’t cry, and you only work for three hours because it’s all that you can take.

On the way home, you stop at Stewarts for gas, and you go inside and take one look at the woman that waits on you, and you can’t look at her anymore. Her whole life’s story is in her eyes--the dropping out of school, the child having a child, the many men, the divorces and the dead end jobs, the sixty year old face on a forty year old body--and you know that the high point of her day will be when the parade of customers lets up and she can go out and have a smoke.

Then you go home and wait for night to fall because somehow the twilight brings you some peace, and you hear the faint scratch of a match and see the flicker of a candle, but it only lasts for a couple of hours and then goes out again.

And the next day is the same. And the next.

And all you can see around you is suffering--yours and everyone else’s and you stop reading the news and watching the television because you can’t bear it. And it goes on for weeks until your wife makes you go see the doctor. And you look into the doctor’s eyes, and you know that this is one doctor who knows pain, in a way that most don’t.

And she recommends a clinic, and as much as you respect her, you know that’s not the less traveled road through the yellow wood that you want to take. You know that paying some guy fifty cents a word to dredge up and read the bones of your past will be for you the same as the time when your father had appendicitis and your grandfather told him to rub turpentine on it.

It’s been a long time since you have written anything, so when you go home you decide to start writing again. Then you decide to take up blogging and to keep blogging whether or not anyone reads it, and as each day goes by you feel a little bit better, until the day comes when you wake up in the morning and look at the candle in the alcove and see that it stayed lit all night long.

And the terror is gone, and you realize that not much changes in life, because their is a conspiracy of silence between bullies and cowards, and you also realize that it is time to quit both of these groups and stand on your hind legs and bellow like a she bear robbed of her cubs.

And if no one listens, at least you have chiseled your protest on the barbed wire topped, concrete wall that’s rapidly rising around the City of Man.

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5 Comments:

  • Amen.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 1:23 AM  

  • Such a sad but nice entry. Just want to let you know that one more person had read your blog today. :)

    By Blogger cahalan, at 4:11 AM  

  • Really enjoyed reading this, Dan. Thanks for the thoughtful post.

    By Blogger Strikeslip, at 8:03 AM  

  • I for one am glad that you blog and glad that it helps you find your way. I hope you continue.

    By Blogger threecollie, at 10:15 AM  

  • Just read this and it reminded me of what someone told me when the world looked in some ways much the same: "Some writers spin depression into gold."

    Keep it up, man.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 11:48 AM  

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