Feeding My Arms. Or Something Like That.

--Because I grew up in the age of computer technology, a Tandy in the house when I was fifteen, I’ve got documents—letters, stories, novels, screenplays, assignments—that go back almost fifteen years. I’ve lost a lot along the way, but how odd it is that we can carry so many words on a disc.

All those freeze frames of who we were. Or thought we were. Or wanted to seem to be.

--I go back through folders, old stuff. This is a type of nostalgia.
Sometimes reading something and it feels like it wasn’t written by me.
Sometimes coming across something the context of which I cannot even invent.

--Always writing. No, not always. Since I was ten I guess.
Little stories. The school paper.
Older, there was almost always a girl or two to whom I wrote letters.
These very individualized audiences.

I realize these letters, they were exercises.
My writing, the stuff that I do professionally, the stuff that never pleases me, that’s the actual game. I’m on the field plying my craft. Trying to make do for real with what I’ve learned from practice and whatever it was I was born with.

I don’t write letters anymore. I email, but it’s not the same.

And I blog. Like the letters I used to write.
These exercises.
This slightly wider audience.

--I find these stories, these smears, I called them, for they aren’t really stories, just little expressions, the kind of thing you can type up in class when you are pretending to take notes.

In fact, when I was working toward my doctorate, I wrote a ton of them, and from a few of those grew the collection Animal Rights and Pornography, which was not my dissertation, which was instead my guilty pleasure.

Bad student that I was. Lost in the literature world which made up about seventy percent of my classes, those comprehensive exams looming heavy at the end of three years.

Me, I entered with a master’s in screenwriting. I didn’t even know what the Renaissance was. Couldn’t have told you even the century in which Bacon was born.

I worked my ass off, three years, reading all the time, outside of class.

But in class, minesweeper, letters, smears.

I’m reading them over this morning, before my son wakes up, and I find a few that are particularly telling, particularly consistent with who I am and I suppose have been.

So because I’m busy, because my son is in town, because the day is warm and the sky clear, because it will never see the light of day in other form (and I promise not to do this that often again), instead of blogging, here is one of those smears, those near stories, those somethings that I wrote once upon a time when apparently I wasn’t much different than I am now.

Feeding My Arms
I eat more than I naturally should. It is an effort of will. I am feeding my arms. I feed my arms all manner of foods. They are burning and engorged from repeated curls and presses with weights. I can feel the food squeeze up inside of them.

I have grown to hate food. I do not remember what it is like to be hungry. Hunger is a wistful fantasy. My mouth will not chew for me as quickly as I want it to. It, like my arms, is weary. I say to myself: I have to be relentless. I have to be tenacious. I have to be undaunted.

I imagine that some day my arms will be bigger than I am. You will see them out on their own without the benefit of me or my mouth.

The incredible cut and girth of them will hold your attention.

You will wonder how impossibly hard they can squeeze and of what lifting wonders they are capable.

People will say, perhaps in defense of some small or large wrong I’ve committed, “Yes, but did you see his arms?”