the shaper

Yes it’s about telling a story.  But it’s also about shape.  I’ve been toying with this idea.  Sitting in this coffee shop hooked up to an IV drip of caffeine, plugged into earphones, and electricity, and trembling ever so gently.  I’ve got the task of squeezing this thing onto the page.  Contorting it like a tube of toothpaste with the cap screwed on.  Making one end bulbous and the other flat as an ax blade.

There are good stories.  There are good storytellers.  Then there are writers.  I’ve got to be a writer.  I don’t know where the compulsion comes from.  I’ve  tried to shake it with day jobs and depression, but it’s always there.  So the next logical step is exposing myself.

I’m not talking about pulling back the trench coat and pressing my genitals against the cold glass of the coffee shop window.  I’m talking about letting the reader know who’s punching in the words.

That’s a part of it right?  All of those books on all of those shelves and there’s always some grunt behind the scenes, hunched, tapping all those silly words into neat lines.  I picture them sometimes while I read.  I read newspaper articles and I get an image of frail, wrinkled fingers, stretched out, starting at the edge of the table and making their way like twigs onto the keyboard.  Attached to them, I think about an elderly thing with bifocals and not much energy or excitement left in their eyes.  I don’t think they had it to begin with, but I see it has clearly run out.  I can smell them.  They’re showered, lightly perfumed, powdered.  They’ve got kids and grandkids, maybe.  But for the moment, they’ve isolated themselves in a room with ugly wallpaper.

I don’t want to wonder what they’ll think when they read my shit.  That’s where shape comes in.  The paragraphs are all about the same size.  I don’t want to be confused with the withered typist, sipping tea, surrounded by all of that ugly wallpaper.  I have to bend things.  I have to pound down one section and run a stone across another.  There are edges.  There are bruises where women left and friendship died and fear ran over my feet.  It’s not all smooth and beautiful.  There’s no ugly wall paper here.

I’d rip the ugly wall paper down.  I think that’s important for people to know.  If they picture me here writing in peace with a turtleneck sweater, that would kill me.  That would fester and chew at the structure of the story and I can’t have that.  My job is to deliver the story.  

Know that the words aren’t clear.  They’re typed and spaced and printed, but when they come out they’re mumbled.  That’s how I hear them at least.  I’ve got to repeat them and stack them on top of themselves.  Only then might they become legible.

Maybe I don’t have it as bad as the drunks and the junkies.  But my shape isn’t perfect.  I can afford $3 to sit in the coffee shop.  I’ve got a sleek computer and there’s only one tiny hole in the heel of my sock.  That hole wasn’t born out of poverty, but movement.  Starting an stopping.  Changing directions.  The right foot has a tendency to dance around inside the shoe.  It’s a ballast.  It works to negate the murmur of the crowds and the foot traffic, and to offset the expectations.

I’ve got to give it some shape.  I’ve got to give it depth and a particular dimension.  It doesn’t need all the details.  They don’t need to know everything.  It’s a silhouette I’m hacking out of hardwood.  An outline of the creature behind the words.  There’s no need to make it blatant.  It doesn’t have to be loud or dancing.  It is not meant to be the center of attention, but instead, a shadow looming in the background.  It’s an image only visible to those of a particular state of focus or drunkenness, part glory, part disaster.  It comes when the light hits the page just right and the music is perfectly stuck between two songs.  It happens not of joy or sadness, but a minced serving of both, tossed with piss and vinegar.

In this way, I can let them know me without ever stepping out of the tall grass.  It’s not all of them I’m aiming for.  Some will read without thinking.  They’ll read without getting past all of the words.  They’ll follow the path gayly.  Never realizing the feeling that they are being watched.  Their instincts are dull or dead.

I’ll give some of them a shape to notice while they read.  But I watch also.  I’ve been toying with this instinct.  A predilection that allows me to steer people down the yellow brick road of my design. To sharpen the writing while honing my strikes.  The whole thing becomes a two-way mirror.

I watch from the corner seat of the coffee shop, with one hand on the keyboard, the other close to my body, one finger plunged through my t-shirt into my bellybutton.  It’s creepy, maybe.  Weird, probably.  

I must entertain myself — at the readers expense and also as a means of survival.