Return to Writing Because
It’s always the same after you’ve been gone. You can’t find your way back in. Some heavy door has shut behind you and locked itself. You have the key. You always have the key. The thing is even when you unlock the darn thing it’s heavy as fuck to open back up. You pull at the handle, but it doesn’t budge. You admit that you’re not giving it your all. You yank at it to tell yourself you’re really committed when the truth is you’re scared shitless. You’ve forget what’s in there. Your mind starts crafting stories about all the terrible failures and almosts lurking in the inky shadows. You forget that you can switch the light on at any time and see the shine of what’s inside you coming alive on the blank page, glowing with no other purpose than simply because. —Samantha Wallen
Samantha Wallen is: “Founder/CEO @WriteInPower, poet, writer, book coach, social justice disciple, steam-punk time traveler tending to where value, core wounds, and brilliance meet.
I found her when I was doing anything I could to not open the seemingly twenty ton door that was my journal cover. “You yank at it to tell yourself you’re really committed when the truth is you’re scared shitless.” How could a woman I never met know me so well?
I’ve opened the door – or more likely, the door has opened. I suggest that you check out Samantha Wallen and her wisdom. Then, tell us what you have found about yours.
*****
And here is Jacqueline Kehoe. Are there any phone booths left?
I’m sure there are, literally. Little cornflower blue dots on highways, always dusty, always smelling like coffee stewed in urine. At least, that’s how I remember them. I’ve no idea why. I haven’t seen a phone booth in years. The only one I can remember from my childhood was outside the mall. Why are malls so communist-looking? Maybe they all aren’t, but mine sure was. Like a phone booth outside Chernobyl. Might as well be the same.
But you’re not asking about literal phone booths — though they might as well be one in the same anymore. You’re asking me about spots the “mainstream media” hasn’t hijacked. Spots they haven’t defiled, shit on, etched with lipstick, vomited on, trampled, or otherwise destroyed by exhaling carbon dioxide and eating away at the fibers of time with their finger oils. Are there any of those spots left?
This feels vaguely Holden Caulfield-esque, and I have to say, I was hoping I had mentally matured beyond that level. It could be the sequestration of this plane, the cramped quarters, the mental non-sequiturs trying every nook and cranny to find a way out. The blood is already pooling in my ankles, which has got to be one of my least favorite feelings. I am voluntarily numbing my own ass and filling my stomach with microwaved vegetarian lasagna. All in the quest of being interesting and sating my own curiosity.
Have I talked to you about my psychological obsession with the reasons why we travel? I wrote an article on it for The Plaid Zebra, but it’s kind of shitty, so I’m not sharing it with you. Ha! The crux of it is that there’s a new generation that travels because they’re insecure, afraid, etc etc etc ad nauseum. I say “new” loosely — surely this manifested itself in previous generations, just different ways due to new-fangled technology. Like now, and how I’m writing to you at 36,000 feet in the air, in orbit around our screaming planet.
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