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Thursday, April 11, 2013

BEGINNING TO START OVER AFTER STOPPING AND...


...STARTING OVER AGAIN…AND AGAIN

 
All Words Lead To The End…at least, in the beginning…

I have already imagined the book signings, interviews, and lecture dates.  I have imagined people telling me how my story changed something in their life---for the better, I muse and assume.  In my mind, I have started on my next book, my next project. 

This is so wrong!!  And it’s wrong because it is not helping me finish the first draft of this stagnant Still Moving manuscript.  At night, I talk to the various drafts of the book---or rather to the image in my mind of all the disparate pieces of writing that fill those dozens of journals, shelves and boxes of words, sentences, chapters, in my house.   There is the two-thirds completed manuscript about my three years as a Playboy Bunny during the amazing Sixties in Manhattan…and there is the gentle novel based on the question , Who might I have become if, at a special turning point in my Life, I had turned left instead of right, or had gone east instead of west or had said no instead of yes…When I was working on that hidden, wishful-thinking, self-realizing, self-aggrandizing  gem, I was a Gallery Owner in Santa Fe, imagining (!) what it would have been like to have chosen a music career—to have become Lola,  a sexy, blues singer in some exotic place like maybe New Orleans…Or, suppose I had just settled for a smaller private Life---like Shirley,  my invented character who worked at a big Truck Stop at the edge of Amarillo?  And then there was Barbara, the wife of a career Army Officer…and Clara a lonely successful Physicist…I have let those wonderful women languish in the vortexes of incomplete adventures and truncated conversations with other invented human characters who may or may not have ever existed…Having abandoned them, I let their secrets die---and some of my own as well.  However, I am a believer in immortality for everyone and everything and these tales can be resurrected (or not) at any time---or to be more precise, whenever I get my shit together.  Now, wait!  That’s not fair.  It’s not shit.  And even if it were, it’s together.  Just not finished!

Yet.

It’s all there:   the writings on The Alphabet Institute;  the counting the days backwards to my death journal;  the compilation of favorite words of a wide variety of people;  the erotica;  the pursuit of places I built during vision questing;  the reports and revelations gleaned from travels to Fiji; Egypt; Scotland; Uzbekistan; Patagonia…Everywhere!

 
So what!?  So what if I have lived all these years intending to share my joy at having lived all these years without having shared much of anything.

Until Now!
Now, I am ready, directed, capable, and excited to begin to start over after many beginnings have ended.
 
Photo:  Tanya Taylor Rubinstein

3 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Im looking for the Gallery owner who contracted Heather Bowler in July 2012 for a show on July 27th, 2012. Or for any one who might have information about this woman.
    Thanks,
    Tere McDowell
    mcdowell.teresa@gmail.com

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  3. Your writing is beautiful...makes me wonder?

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