Riverman under cliff: 2008-02-17

The riverman~~~ has not been writing.

Ah... but you knew that already didn't you Reader? For a good four months, this blog has stayed pin-drop and empty, a roman-ruin of yesteryear's firecracker-echoes. And with each day, the silence drum-drones into a question.

Why?

It isn't unconsciousness.

I have been alive to my feet in my shoes and the busker on the street-corner. I have watched a hundred movies from Malcolm X to Atonement over these months and in the silence after the credits raced a million thoughts around my head - full dizzy and real. I have plugged into the newsfeeds - from the Obama-Clinton titan clash on Super-Tuesday to the pranticks of Amy Winehouse on her routine stumble from crack dealer to the Brits to cider-spilling onto the pavements in Clapham.

It isn't apathy.

I have cringed over the slipperiness of David Cameron. My fists have clenched over the straw-shoved-arguments over section 377A at home. I have a million counter-retorts behind burning lips for the naggy-nonchalence of the Londoner to anything outside the Evening Standard, and rankling anxiety everytime a thwarted terrorist stashes away his holy-book and oils himself in human rights law to slip out of handcuffs.

It isn't non-activity.

There were gun-powder clouds on Guy Fawkes Night and the next morning I surveyed my rocket-shell peppered lawn. There was the Christmas crackling of Lau's roast chicken wafting into to the Auld-lang-syne and frantic phone-calls across time and space and far and near on a cold and damp new year's morning. There was Munich and all its beauty lost on me and the one I love for a week, and the days that flew by too fiendishly quick. There was Valentine's Day, flick-filmsy with rose-scented-cupidious-caprice...

...and now there's today… and maybe an opportunity to sound the bell.

It's not like as though I haven't thought about this blog. The riverman~~~ has wandered into this site several times a week. But everytime I get onto the edit page my fingers stay pin-prick-poised over the keyboard, my eyes sweep over the paper-white screen, my head fills with a blur of images and cacophonous ideas clamouring over only to collapse into a Blank.

Then this overwhelming urge takes over to do anything BUT write, and I simply want to read the BBC newspage or curl in my sofa and watch the new DVD stashed away in my bag with my groceries or pick up the phone and share a joke with a friend or get a couple of mates over for a spontaneous jazz jam or maybe send my battalions of soldiers on a rampage against the warlords in cyberspace.

It is funny! Everytime I think of writing in this blog, there are a million reasons for doing everything else.

You know the saying that you can never ever write a good song if you are absolutely happy? Well, could this be the case here? Wasn't my best composition a result of tear drenched evenings and painful conversations over the what-ifs and could-ifs all through last year?

This year has been the happiest I have ever known and correspondingly the most destitute of melody and rhyme. I started this blog last year, and it was the panacea for all my uncertainty and fear of whatever-would-be and if-it-could-be.

These days I feel certain. I feel sure, and scarily-sure sometimes. Could this be the reason for my online truancy?

Of course, there may be another reason...

"Is there anything in spontaneity?
Is the only way to know
To let the pen and paper go
And do like they say and just be?"

I was reading this little verse yesterday, and it came to me. Maybe it's not the lack of melancholy or artistic suffering. Maybe it's not mundane writer's block. Maybe it's simply the thirst to live… to give into the throb of life and to walk a little in the everyday. Maybe it's the need to give in to the ramalamadingdong and "just be"?

Maybe my inertia of the page allows me my freedom to experience and breathe.

Writing is self-reflection, and perhaps all I am doing is adding to the matters I can reflect on another day and someday. Perhaps these thoughts need to marinate before I wring them out and hang them out to dry. I will need a little more time, and so I beg your indulgence Reader.

See, the riverman~~~'s doing a little Living today.