O.K., I’ve been looking for this one particular box for several months now, cleaned the balcony looking for the box, reorganized our basement storage space thoroughly looking for this box and I remember I was already searching as early as July because I went through the basement once and found a fan, and it was at a time when we really needed it.
A couple of days ago, while rummaging through some other boxes, my wife finally asked me what I was looking for. “There’s a bunch of poems I’ve got in a folder labeled ‘Ancient History,’ I said.
“Oh, I know where that is,” she said. I am an ass. What with writing this blog every day, I probably communicate better with the outside world than I do with my family.
Then, she went back to yelling at the kids, it was all in Czech, and the subject was forgotten, but tonight she got the box down for me and it was more than I’d hoped for. Although the file marked ‘Ancient History’ turned out to be not the one I was looking for at all, there was another file, called ‘Old Stuff,’ which was.
I was looking for some old, old poems, stuff that I wrote even before I came to Prague, before I got married and had kids, back when I still drank heavily, back when I was much thinner than I am now, back when I was living in Los Angeles, in another lifetime (my life has been a bit like that so far, episodes defined by the place I was living, and that really have very little relation, one to the other.)
Well, I found them and there were a couple more than I’d thought, and even some stuff I’d forgotten about writing at all. Several first chapters of a novel, for one thing, but they weren’t any good, it was just like reading an old diary. It’s interesting to me, because it recalls the moment, but there wouldn’t be much interest to anybody else. People want conflict, and drama – not my impressions of someone I saw on the tram, or what pubs I went to on a Friday night.
But, a couple of interesting things: Despite the changes in my life since then, I’m not sure I’ve evolved as a writer at all. Although I’m writing more now, and more consistently, I was just as good then.
Also, I wrote a couple of poems recently which had a line like “the 7 billion people who all live on Earth” and I found one old poem where I’d used the same line but with only 6 billion people and one, older still, probably from about ’92 or ’93, where I say 5 billion.
Population explosion is not an exaggeration.
www.gurukalehuru.com 