I’ve been busy all day. Doing this, doing that. Always with the ghost of a thought flitting around my head, reaching from corners, peering through the window – there’s something else, isn’t there?
No matter what I’ve done today – and I’ve been totally inside (both literally and figuratively) all day – I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something more, something bigger. That the world is just waiting for something. If there’s a silence, surely it needs to be filled. Right?
Maybe not. But maybe. I don’t know.
Writing this post has left me more restless than before. Some will read this and think, “Why is Gerard depressed?” Let me assure you, I’m not. I’m just searching – or, rather, my mind is searching for the something else that’s out there.
What should I be doing? Where should I turn my attention tomorrow.
I have things to do. Every day, I work. Every day, I write the book. Thank you for that line, Elvis Costello.
Maybe it’s that restless feeling that Springsteen describes: “I’m sick of sittin’ ’round here tryin’ to write this book.” But that’s not it either. I actually love writing. I don’t get nearly enough time for writing, and that’s a fact.
I’ve been plagued lately with the thought that I have so many stories to tell that I wonder if I’ll live long enough to tell them all – to write them all down, to get them out into the world.
Sometimes, I feel like I’m living life backwards, like I’ve already said and done all the things that people are only now catching up to. I see bits of myself everywhere, except they’re bits that I said long ago, and I’m only seeing an echo of them now on social media.
And it leaves me feeling disconnected, like an old man trying to tell the kids, “Why, when I was your age…”
I don’t even know what I’m trying to say, except maybe this: there’s more. There’s something else. None of this is enough. None of this is all there is.
But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t just chill. Does it?
And, in reading this, I think what I really mean is that there’s more of me. There’s something else of me, isn’t there? I have more to say, more to do, more places to go, more to be. And it’s not that I have more to prove anything because the only one I need to impress is me, and, believe me, that’s something that doesn’t happen very often.
The only time I’m satisfied is when I manage to speak some truth. Some irrefutable godspoken insight that makes me feel like the gears of the earth just clicked into place and, some day, someone’s going to find that thing I said and not throw it away, but tuck it away and keep it, and take it out on a dreary evening and say, “Yeah, that’s the thing. That’s something real.” Not because I said it, but because it got said – the word that attaches itself to a thought and gives form to the spirit.
I think I’m done for now, for now.
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