Creative Writing Neurosis

If you can get through this whole thing without losing interest, I will be flattered.

FEBRUARY 2007
I was sitting in a room, maybe not so much a room but more like a place. I’ve always felt that between a room and a place was indifference and purpose. You may have a room for working, for instance, but that room is important to you and you’ve spent time decorating it and you bought that pillow and this lamp-shade and in some way this room reflects a part of you. What’s more, you probably don’t just work in this room that you describe to those who visit your home as “work room” or “office”. You’ve no doubt eaten in this room or paced around and drawn on brochures while talking on the phone in it. That’s hardly work. And no one has the kind of unnecessary discipline to only work in their “work room”. Anyway, that’s why it’s a room and not a place.
Places are used by many people and have little personal involvement or emotional investment and are in many, many, ways safer than any room.
I was sitting on a brown leather couch in this place facing a window and there were other people talking about things I had never heard of and the place was playing music I didn’t know and I was facing a window. Did I mention the window? It was large and took up most of the wall opposite me and I was facing it. I was thinking of all of the people I remembered recently and the people I thought of all the time even though they had no real or obvious place in my life and I was still facing the window. It was sunny outside and the sun was shining through the window wall and doing that thing the sun does when it shines in your eyes and obscures everything else from your vision.
Anyway the sun was doing its “sun thing” and reducing all the people and things in front of me having their unknowable conversations in front of me to these black slightly shifty silhouettes.
You know what I mean by slightly shifty? Like the way people move on security cameras versus the way they look in the movies? Like how in the movies there could be one camera, totally stationary, performing the same function and even at the same angle as a security camera, watching a person or people engage in perfectly natural movements yet some how if a security camera captures this the people seem shifty. Maybe it’s the quality of the film or maybe it’s because we’re culturally conditioned to believe in movies and believe that movements people make that are caught on film are good, intentional, and acceptable. But security cameras, perhaps stemming from the fact that security cameras exist to document events that are not supposed to happen, make whatever movements recorded seem unnatural (or excessively natural?), vulgar, and crude. “I could not possibly look like that,” we think, “I don’t move like that, I may tap my fingers or mess with my hair in a similar fashion,” we reflect self-consciously, “but I don’t look like that”.
Well one of the few things I know is that we do,
I do.
And what’s more, those black silhouettes that were actually real people who sat in front of me, tilting their heads and scratching their noses and performing all manner of reactions to corporeal existence and the physical world,
Those people did look like that.
Those people were shifting.