Pillow Talk

Okay, it’s been a very long day. I am very sleepy. My pillow is calling to me saying, “Come here Geof, bury your face in me. I am seductive like the sweet embrace of death, but you wake up in the morning so please. Please. Please come to me.”

I’ll be real honest with you. This is gonna be one of those posts where I just ramble a bit because I’ve been keeping up the streak of posting every day and I’ll be god-damned if I break that streak.

But there’s no way I’m getting a good story out of this sleepy ole brain tonight.

I try to think of things like “story structure” or “where did I put that list of story ideas,” and my brain goes woozy, like a woozy thing.

In Scheherazade terms, this is definitely a night for me to tell a story about how one time some merchant farted somewhere in Baghdad.

But enough throat-clearing. Let me actually talk about something.

Posted something about love earlier today. Or yesterday, by the time I actually post. Or maybe even the day before yesterday, depending on where you live — which is crazy to think about when I actually think about it. But to get to the point — I was pretty dismissive of the idea of love in that post. Which is my attitude some of the time, to be sure, but not always. Maybe not even most of the time.

If I were totally cynical about love, I don’t think I’d write about it as much as I do. Or even if I did, I would always be hitting the same cynical notes. Of course sometimes I’m in a cynical mood so I write about it cynically — I am a creature of strong moods, I’ll admit.

But I keep probing at the idea because some intuition tells me there’s something essential there. And I don’t have much patience for people who tell me things like this don’t bear thinking about — because that might be fine for them, but what am I gonna do, live by my instincts? My instincts, from the day I was born, have screamed one thing and one thing only: get in a cave and hide.

People with healthy instincts and sound common sense probably don’t need to think things through explicitly the way I do — and the way you probably do too, if you’re a regular here.

… which brings me to something I got to thinking about. For a very long time, I’ve avoided being in any way close with anyone. But for the last couple of months, I’ve been putting up these posts daily — which is a couple of hours of work per day. And it’s fairly intimate stuff, at least to me. There are days when I feel awfully exposed when I go to hit that “publish” button. Because there’s a lot in these writings someone could choose to judge me for, very negatively. Because I’ve done this, or written that, or even thought about so-and-so. Or because my thoughts aren’t always perfectly ordered and sometimes I get carried away by a mood or an idea I feel like is super-clever (even though it’s really not all that clever) and end up feeling ashamed afterward.

Because a lot of what I’m doing here is digging up bits of my unconscious mind and trying to sort them out. And some of those things I’ve discovered… well, they’re not very pretty. And none of what I’ve found is very refined at this point. But it’s all me, and I need to integrate that stuff in some way.

But the point here is that I think I’ve left myself very exposed with some of these posts and stories. And being exposed in that way is something I’ve been terrified of for as long as I can remember. I’d feel like once somebody would see who I am under all the layers of fakery and bullshit they’d be outta here — just recoil in disgust, dread, and embarrassment.

And some people do that, of course. It’s only natural.

But some people don’t. Some of you don’t. Some of you come back to read my posts every day, or almost every day. And I figure… maybe I was wrong about me. Maybe there’s something in me that’s worth coming back to, and maybe I’m not just dirt and slime and nastiness all the way down. And maybe that thing is worth the effort of facing the daily grind and putting myself together and buckling down to master this writing thing after all.

And maybe there’s reason to hope life can be good someday.

And that’s something I haven’t believed for a long, long time. At times I’ve tried to play the little tyrant with myself and force myself to believe it, but it just hasn’t worked. But now I’m seeing something else. Just a little glimmer, just a little hope.

But maybe, just maybe, I was wrong to despair all along.

I guess what I’m saying is, I’m glad you’re here. Especially if you’re a regular. I won’t name names, you know who you are and I know who you are — unless there are some lurkers, which wouldn’t totally surprise me…

It means a lot to me. More than I thought it would.

Anyway, that pillow’s still calling to me. I think I’ll go answer the call. With luck I’ll be back to writing stories again tomorrow. But I do enjoy writing these personal pieces, from time to time.

So in closing, just let me say: thank you.