The Write Stuff

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July 19th, 2011

Peter’s birds are sitting over my shoulder. They seem to wonder why an intruder is laptopping in their kitchen and they begin tweeting. Yes, even the parakeets in New York City have Twitter accounts. Trè chic! Ugh, they’ve collectively turned their backs on me; pun-haters. Sophisticated, domesticated birds aside, this quick swing into “the city” […]

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Peter’s birds are sitting over my shoulder. They seem to wonder why an intruder is laptopping in their kitchen and they begin tweeting. Yes, even the parakeets in New York City have Twitter accounts. Trè chic!

Ugh, they’ve collectively turned their backs on me; pun-haters.

Sophisticated, domesticated birds aside, this quick swing into “the city” has been remarkable. We’ve been staying with Peter Ross, a photo friend who Marci and I met at the exact same time, way back during our Ann Arbor News days. That newspaper is long gone and the building has turned into a bank now, but our friendship has continued across the decades.

Like us, Peter has re-tooled his photography and one of his coolest endeavors of late was taking pictures of the odds and ends left behind when Beat Generation author William Burroughs passed away. Called simply Burrough’s Stuff, our friend has created a gallery show highlighting some of the normal and crazy things left behind by the writer. Peter doesn’t mock the man with his photographs. He simply points out what remains: a quilt, a panama hat, shoe shine and brushes, books, magazines and my favorite, a pair of shoes with the soles worn through.

Yes, the personal tour of the show hanging in the Conde Nast building was tremendous, but what keeps bubbling up in my conscious is what we all leave behind on earth once we write The End. Will my insane devotion to World’s Softest Socks define me for a generation? Or will that trunk of memories I locked up in 1989 resurface with surprise and shock? Worse, will anyone care?

You can really mess yourself up if you start looking over your shoulder at birds or mortality. I’m guessing if we pay too much attention to the squeaks and squawks of what might be or the maybe-ifs, there’s the potential to do some real violence to the right-nows. Living for the moment is tough if you get too engrossed in the final moment.

Right now I’m enjoying a quiet moment with a cool drink and an even cooler friend. Why should I worry about things many years in the future? Why do I sometimes zip down that turnpike from bouncy-happy to somber-reflective in a matter of moments?

And why, when I sit down to tell about Spiderman and subways, do my fingers hijack the keyboard and start prying open planks in my moldy subterranean self? Those things are down there for a reason, Rodney. Leave them alone for now you fool.

Peter won’t be shooting my socks or opening that trunk for the world to witness. Nor, I’m guessing, will anyone else. So I can drag myself back to the present. There’s fun and lightness to be had. Quoting myself yet again I remember, “There’s a time and a place, for the here and the now.”

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