The Racket #35 : FREEDOM w/ David Hallock Sanders / 10.24.2019 / 7PM / Alley Cat Books

So much to do. So much to say.

I never really feel how much the end of the year twists and turns my schedule until I start seeing how this event suddenly becomes less of an enjoyable side project and more of a needy child pulling on my hand when I'm trying to cook dinner or have a drink or watch a movie. My brain is constantly firing regardless, but with the weight of the last third of the year resting on my shoulders, nothing can really sit on the back-burner. And this year in particular as I've tossed aside some of the old constraints in search of new adventures, everything feels like it needs to be completed right now, right this very moment or it is going to slip and fall and break and then the whole house of cards is - poof - nothing but a puddle. 

There is a constant panic when everything is spinning, when every plate needs to be balanced and it is a high octane fuel I unhealthily feed on. A sense of just skipping over the bottomless abysses with all of the goodies stacked up in my arms that is exhilarating and exhausting in the same breath. It may be obvious at this point but I'm not one who courts actual danger (that's what books are for), but when I've revved the engines to a point where the whole fucking car is shaking, there's some sense of bordering on the edge of failure that I just can't get enough of. It is running through a labyrinth with the blades swinging across the stone hallways and the spike pits looming below me and some unknown horned beast in fast pursuit. And it feels pretty amazing.

When it is over, when the show has gone on and I'm a drained sack of skin curled up near the curtains it can get a little dark. It can become more apparent than I realized, the absolute obvious suddenly obvious to me, that all of the spinning, the balancing, the completing is a greasy smokescreen hanging low over whatever it is I'm not taking the time to address. 

You would assume that when everything has settled, when the river is running clear and I'm sipping a cold one on its shore that this would be the time to look inside, to see what I've been burying. You would be wrong. More often than not a break in the action turns into a hole to fill with more; a resting period becomes an anxious fret about what else I might be able to do. 

And so I exist, swinging between happily overworked and fretfully quiet, surveying the clutter and patching the empty spaces as quickly as I can.