NEEDLING

STARTING TO DUST MY WALK-IN CLOSET WHICH ALSO SERVES AS THE ENTRANCE TO MY STUDIO

Moved a few things around in my closet. My hands acted out, started stinging all over...

My spiral journals, all thirty-three of them, fit in my little carry-on suit case. Medium size Claire Fountain spiral notebooks inside which I’ve written my journal, where I’ve glued postcards, newspaper articles, photographs, letters, emails, story ideas, poems… loads of drunk desperate entries… bad verse upon bad verse… little pieces of papers torn off from whatever… thirty-three numbers since 1998… I started them when I went to Spain that year taking a break from my first hotel in Paris. I was a night clerk back then.

That’s not so many. All of them in my little carry-on suitcase on wheels, there’s no room left for anything else except a bottle of whisky wrapped in one of my old sweat shirts – just in case I’m on one of those horrible cheap flights where you have to pay for drinks – and a sandwich for the two hour wait at the airport. In my other bag I have to fill it up with notes to my unfinished screenplays, unfinished novels, various versions of unfinished short stories, poems and other bad prose pieces.

What if they loose my bag? The bad copy of “Pancho in spite of himself” I’ve carried on different trips thinking I was actually going to work on it, is my only copy. I don’t know what happened to the floppy I saved a back-up copy on. The hard-drive I was using at the time, burnt out on me a couple years ago. What will I do if they loose my bag? They only let you take one small bag in the plane with you. Should I leave my bag in France in Claire’s basement? But what does that solve? What if – I know it’s highly unlikely – what if I actually find the motivation and energy to rewrite some of those bad manuscripts? What good would they do me in a basement underneath a late 19th century building behind the Butte Montmartre when I’ll be in Texas? So I have to risk having faith in the airline industry? Why can’t they have fucking trans-Atlantic charter boats? At least if it sinks, I’ll sink with all my bad writing…