“If you’re an artist and you perform on this stage, you must think, I’ve made it.”
What’s after you make it?
The kids in front of us draw and smoke American Spirits. She has a pen behind her ear, bobs her head, cool like.
“Shit’s right.”
Dialogue from the TV show last night resonates.
“We should eat the rest of the mushrooms.”
Okay.
Robots can’t write this.
Can’t feel the sun coming through the clouds. Hear the subtleties in the singer’s voice that sound like she knows, like the experience she had growing up in Baltimore and going to church. One of those churches where people get filled with the spirit and fall down.
That stuck with her.
The crowd obeys the music like the waves obey the moon.
Every drop in the ocean is individual yet together.
I look at people’s faces and feel that I am them.
I used to always have to write whenever I did drugs. I felt like I had to take field notes and bring them back to my sober life.
My spiritual progress can be measured by the decrease in my will to write.
I used to pick flowers to bring back to my lover.
But she's here with me now.
We lie back on the blanket and look up at the leaves shaking slowly in the breeze, sunlight shimmering in between.
It feels right right now.
A million flowers bloom in my mind, but I resist the urge to write them.
My editor says the mantras are too cliché anyway.
It is what it is.
And it's right right now.