Tower of Brahma - 51 - stop me if you've heard this one before (edit)

2/16/08

"Eris, Kali, and Loki walk into a bar..." Sean starts into his usual jokes with no punchlines.

It's his free form improv writing style. Each of us has our individual techniques. Sean and his jokes, Juan’s historical anecdotes, Brian’s stream of consciousness, and Tom’s…well, I’m not sure what Tom is up to. Personally, I like to let it build up and explode out. Like a mental time bomb.

We all gathered there in the basement, looking pale and ghostly under the fluorescent lighting. The air was thick with smoke, the fragrant odor of cheap coffee, and our futile aspirations. We called it ‘Write Club’ but we hardly ever wrote. Actually that was what got us all together. Not being able to write.

Juan cuts off Sean's one-liners to tell us about the ten books he's read since our last meet. He’s a good foot and a half taller than Sean and so literally overshadows him as he steps into the circle of chairs in the center of the room.

"So, JFK's older brother was the one with the political design but when his younger brother came back with all them medals, well he did what any sensible overachieving sibling did. He flew a plane full of explosives towards a German factory ready to bail out at the last second when BOOM!"

I stopped double-checking the facts he spouts after the first few weeks. As fictional as the things he says may seem, they always turn out to be true. As I get older writing seems more and more impossible, for what is there to really write about with reality being way stranger and far more beautiful in its symmetry to our chaotic minds.

I look off as Sean shoves Juan battling each other for verbal dominance. Intellectual alpha male social Darwinism never appealed to me. Brian’s sitting off to the side again scrawling and scribbling out in his spiral notebook, his long hair draped across his face. I make my way over and glare at Tom as I do. He's by the coffee maker, back to the wall and eyes on the door.

I sit down next to Brian and light up a smoke.

"How's the writing?" he says, not looking up.

"Meh. You know. I got some ideas. Taking some time to structure them out, get something coherent and interesting down. Something with a point." I reply.

I take a drag off my cigarette and lean back. Nothing sucks like being a writer. All this pressure to make sense and make people care, in a medium that's nearly dead. And here we are pounding in the final nails. Writers in a pop star era, with flash fried masses devouring endless streams of sugar-coated spectacle. Follow the formula to success: don’t be original. It’s not art.

"I got some poems I'm just about happy with." Brian flipped back a few pages. He stopped on one filled with ink.

I had read a few of his pieces before and they were genius. Dark, mad poetry that made the mind cringe and the soul cry. He came across as aloof, but a severe sensitivity forced him inside. He gutted his pain out, spilling it across the page in fluid lines from a black ballpoint pen.

"Okay, okay, wait...Decartes, Kant, and Hume are on a plane about to crash and there's only two parachutes..." Sean waves his arms frantically, trying to draw us all back into another round of jokes. He wrangles Brian back into the circle reluctantly where Juan stands with his arms crossed.

I don’t much feel like laughing so I walk over to grab another coffee and stub my butt in the ashtray, blowing out the last lungful of smoke as I do. Tom still has his eyes on the exit, hand gripping his Styrofoam cup. I imagine that he’s staring into an alternate dimension, killing time with a gang of hacks in a church basement as he monitors a multiverse of possibilities.

"I read your book Charles."

I slap six sugar packets together and rip the corners off.

"Yeah? And?"

"I don't know. It won't sell."

"Thanks. I figured as much."

His words sting. Lately I've felt like I've been wasting my time trying to put my thoughts into words, crafting sentences into stories; all this effort to communicate, but to what end? To become a paid, professional writer? So I can afford to continue to place myself into situations that I can later idealize and then trivialize by demeaning them to a bunch of letters, lifeless symbols, just so someone else will fork over cash to be momentarily entertained?

Truth to tell I had almost totally wiped my hands clean of my unholy text. The story made sense to me when I lived it, and now that I've re-read it, I can see how I got here. I even enjoyed it as a fusion of poetry, prose, and essays. Except for the end. I couldn't bring myself to read the ending.

"It'll be appreciated after you're dead." Tom looks over at me as he says this.

I swig a huge gulp of lukewarm coffee, shake my head, and glance over at him to size him up, to regain some semblance of pride. Sadness weighs his eyes down. It’s more emotion than I imagined from him.

'You poor bastard.' I hear him think to himself.

Tom flips off the lights and locks the door behind us as we all shuffle up into the temple. It was an unspoken tradition now to walk silently through the church, leaving our ramblings behind that heavy wooden door, down in the darkness.

The chatter picks up outside as we all man hug and go our separate ways. Sean belts out one final half-joke as he saunters backwards down the sidewalk.

"Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, and George W. Bush are in a burning building..."

No punchlines here Sean. Other than my life. I feel the same post-meeting depression that hits me on the walk home every Wednesday night. I haven’t written enough, I’m not good enough; I’m wasting so much time just existing. Merely living.

I walk back to my apartment, which is just a few blocks away, but it takes me twice as long tonight. My legs are wobbly and I feel anxious, more than usual. The streets of the East Village are empty and loneliness overtakes me. I want to stop thinking and I don't want to go home.

But I do. And there she is. Waiting for me. I tell her about how the meeting went. Detail out some of the high-points as she sits vacantly on the couch. She’s recording the data, as is her function. She sits there like furniture, a fancy gadget that happens to be made of flesh and bone, although I can’t prove that she is human at all.

I go to the fridge and grab a beer. I pop the cap and stand there looking over at her. There’s nothing I can see about her that would indicate anything. A void of perfect function, she gives no information of herself, and defies my empathic vibe sense. The blankness surrounds her and I, of course, fill it with stories.

I imagine who she was before she started this. Whether she had done this before with other writers. If any of them felt the way I feel about her. This longing to be near her, to feel safe and like it all just doesn't matter, because in the end, when it’s all over, nothing will matter. Just this moment, me watching her, wanting from afar.

This leads to too much thinking, so to counteract it I take a few swigs of the beer and head to my room. I type up some ideas I had from the night and email them to myself. Ideas that would sit with all the other unread emails.

"I've got to write something."

I grab my handheld and sink into my papasan. I start typing away, drawing out an impossible romance. It was coming so easy, literally dancing out of my fingers and across the keys.

A warrior, burdened with a mission doomed from the start. He was hell-bent on killing the beast at the center of the Universe, although he could not remember why. A maiden is found lost along the way, her soul seeking salvation. It is only by chance that they cross paths and together they learn they are fated to topple an empire.

I finish the second act, stopping after they exit the labyrinth, to finish off the beer and light a cigarette. I sit for a while, letting the last few words I had written resonate within my eyes before letting them seep into my brain.

It was a love story. Not my specialty, but I believe it’s what I had always secretly wanted to write. Something foolishly and hopelessly romantic with larger than life adventure and awash with grand gestures. It was naive and beautiful, if not a tad too ethereal and melodramatic.

I let the cigarette burn all the way to ash, then smoke the rest of the pack. I needed an ending to this, but how could I write up the end of love? How could I destroy something so precious, something so wrenched from my gut, something spoken truly from my heart?

'I won't end it. I refuse.' I decide, and bury the story among the rest of my thoughts.

I get up and brush my teeth. I watch her sleeping on the couch. Slowly I run my fingers along her hair and look down at her and let loose a sad sigh.

‘Who are you?’ I try to telepathically transmit to her brain.

I rinse my mouth and hit the light. I collapse into bed and roll over, hugging the covers tightly. My heart was racing my mind, and neither could possibly win. My soul in turmoil, I toss and turn.

And suddenly, I thought of a punchline.