Perhaps I Have Elevated This Banal-Nugget...

and perhaps it will resonate, too, with some of you:

So, I get to the gas station, and I walk in, and it's kinda busy. There's two registers open – a pretty long line on one side, just one dude over on the other. And that's always a red flag right there, I know, cause they're always havin some kinda problem or they're complainin or whatever, but I go over there behind him anyway. I'll try my luck. Sure as shit, he's buyin lottery tickets. He's that guy, buyin one after the other, scratchin em off right at the counter—cause he keeps winnin or whatever—like he's teachin a clinic, holding Lotto-Court over here, but really he's just wastin pretty much everybody's time. I've only been waitin there for like a minute when good ole Lotto Bro gets some bad news, and he doesn't take it all that well. There's not enough money in this register, so he's gotta go around to the other side to cash out and wait in the long-ass line he's more or less solely responsible for. And I'll tell ya, it was beautiful—like poetic justice, I mean—cause when I step up and buy my cigarettes, I can see him shakin his head over there, all surly. He just can't believe he's gotta wait, and I'm thinking, Yeah, it's just not fair is it, Guy? The Inconveniencer becomes the Inconvenienced. That's poetic justice, right?

Wallpaper

Sure, and Yeah, I take pictures with a poor man's cellular telephone camera. What of it? I'll even deign to--stoop so low as to--use an especially inspired cell phone pic as the background image (tiled, like wallpapered) for my inexhaustible blog, my vertitable e-Sanctuary. It's quite an image, and I'm not the only to say so. What is it made of? Or, for the prescriptive linguists among us: Of what is it made?

 ***

This marginal picture, it's made of Leap Day 2012. Made of unseasonable warmth, and heavywet, fallen Midwest snow. Made of subsequent meltage, forming a tea-colored side-yard pond. Made of dude-man's imagination and thirsty eye. Made of love for low-light February afternoons, love for reflections upon water. Made of poetic/prosaic inclinations.

***

On a cigarette break from the indoors, I've seen this thing, glimpsed it from my lookout, and I think it's great, inexhaustible, worth having for posterity, for some peculiar aww-lookit-this reason (the collector/documentor's impulse, I suppose). With appropriate boots, I walk to the temporal banks of Sideyard Pond, where I fall in love with this layered image: like, superimposed or something, like badass Photoshop magic, like glazed and varnished Maxfield Parrish...but here it is in my yard. Snap the pic that becomes wallpaper--the tree, that venerable Silver Maple, reflected in providential side-yard water.

Hours later, in a computer program called iPhoto, the imp of something compels me to rotate the picture one-hundred & eighty digital degrees. Boom! Magic. The edge of snow at my then-feet becomes some sort of corroded, beginning-to-burn-celluloid-film sky (now quite surreal), and the reflected tree--that once upside down thing--is now upright. WOW, we've got it: a daily inexhaustible.

"Why I Am Not a Painter," or, Addendum to an Inaugural Blog Post Called "Alive and Languaging"

"Why I Am Not a Painter" by Frank O'Hara, read it. (Please and Thank You.)

Why I am not a painter: I've never learned to paint. Like not at all. Speaking of paint, and thinking of addenda (plural of addendum, I'm finding out), here is another anchor-quote that I think does something to explain the impetus and/or impulse for establishing this here blog, for posting my proofs of daily-inexhaustibility. Look:

"The painter paints as if in urgent need to discharge himself of his sensations and his visions."

-- a painter, last-named Picasso

 Urgent need? Check. To discharge? Gross...but, yes, check. Sensations? Certainly; I have lots of those. Visions? A bit grandiose, but, yeah, writerly ones. So instead of leaving my urgent discharges* -- my jotted ball-point acrobatics -- on scratch paper for posterity, they'll go down here...plus some pics I take... and plenty of other God-knows-whats.

* Again, gross...but not really...more sexy than gross, I suppose and hope. It's quite natural, after all.

"Alive and Languaging"

To anchor is to secure firmly in position. An anchor is a not-small thing with weight enough to anchor other not-small things. To anchor the blog, one posts the inaugural post, to explain its blog-origins, to make clear its blog-intentions, to give the blog, at bottom, foundational weightiness. To do so is no small thing. (Already, I'm stalling, struck by the sight of “to do so is no,” wondering how many two-letter words I could string together and still make sense...if to do so is no...or to do so is no...?) So, if to do so is no small thing, then how to proceed? By amalgamating, of course, by anchoring with an anchor made of anchors. These--which so nicely articulate the origins of this blog called The Daily Inexhaustible--are my anchors. And may I suggest that you read them again and again and again?

***

“Since my productiveness proceeds in the final analysis from the most immediate admiration of life, from the daily inexhaustible amazement at it (how else should I have come to create?), I should regard it as a lie to refuse even for a moment its flow towards me.”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters: 1914-1921

 

“Some days I'm afflicted / with Observation Fever / omnivorous perception of phenomena”

– Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from “Bickford's Buddha” in The Secret Meaning of Things

“You have to have your ears open. You have to have your goddamn ears open or you are not going to be a poet. Or you are not going to be a writer of any importance whatsoever.”

– Lew Welch, from an interview in San Francisco Beat

“The world is alive and languaging, though it will not pause to be reread or composed. […] Life presents itself at velocities beyond representation, but quick attentions can quicken our poems, and then oh how prolific all presences become.”

– Donald Revell, from The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye

“Creativity is the encounter of the intensely conscious human being with his or her world.”

– Rollo May, from The Courage to Create

***

As a slightly younger man, and around the time I began to take myself at least somewhat seriously as a writer and thinker-guy, I declared an aesthetic (as you do):

What pleasant purity is to be found, is still possible, in American Life, as lived by yours truly?

An aesthetic question, I suppose, and I'm blushing just a bit, now, after sharing this; But I'll stand by it. Why? Primarily because the above anchor-quotations have intermittently arrived in my life since that fateful declaration day to affirm and further develop my writerly vision, my conception of Beauty (there, I said it), AKA what it is I'm after creatively. What you will see on this blog has something to do with the uber-cliché known as “everyday life.” And Positivity. And Receptivity. And Attentiveness. And “Seeing.” And Thinking On, Over, Into, Through, Around.

In short, The Daily Inexhaustible is to be, is hereby christened: Creative Nonfictions, or, The Brainchildren of Observation Fever.