Looking for Structure but No, Not Really

     I have been journaling in the mornings to get all the craziness out of my head. I do feel better afterwards but the thoughts return like pinballs bouncing off knobs with lights flashing and bells dinging. That's my mind--colorful and busy.  My friend who lives in Oxford asked me if I wanted us to be accountable to one another for our writing habits and of course I said yes. For a few days, we both journaled in the mornings and I wrote a page at night and she wrote a poem. Then it sort of just, well, we stopped. It isn't very productive to have two mentally hyper women trying to hold each other accountable. We did text each other long messages that were probably more than a page. She obsessed over saints with visions and a nun's finger worn as a necklace, and the finger bled for a long time and didn't decompose. I rambled about the "unclean" woman with the blood disorder who reached out and touched the hem of Jesus' garment and I whined about the medicine I am having to take and how I can't sleep and all the other side effects. She sent me picture texts of poetry book covers and I sent her updates about my grandmother who has dementia and sometimes thinks my aunt (and everyone else) is out to kill her. But we failed. We didn't increase our productivity of writing.
   
     I work in a bookstore. I keep eyeing The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. A man I was deeply obsessed with,  I mean to a sickening degree--I was only 26 years old and way crazier than I am now--gave me that book. I think I followed the rules or suggestions or whatever for a week, or maybe I just told him I did. Anyways, at work, I flip through the pages of that book and I see a lot of beneficial tasks but then I see it's for twelve weeks and I know me and I won't do the whole thing because life will get in the way. But then I think that even if I only do some of it, maybe I will become more disciplined.  Then I realize that I hate discipline. I like to be sort of out there and half cocked with visions of bleeding fingers and a matriarch gone mad, as well as the late night typing not sure what is going to fall on the page but typing anyways--even if it is just once a week.  And I love the textathons with my best friend and how through it we solve each others problems even if we get distracted by Camus' Sisyphus or Catherine Millet's gang bangs. Others may disagree. These others may even be more successful and highly productive, but I like to do everything backwards and wrong and watch how it all still falls into place.

     Here is snippet of a piece that I started a week ago. It's still in the rough rough phase.

     Carla took photos of herself and pinned them up on the wall behind her bed’s headboard.  Polaroids bent at the edges and curled yellow from nicotine and dust hovered above her as she slept. She screamed in some, mouth open, teeth showing, eyes wide like she was startled. Her breasts peered out between undone buttons in others and in some she was fully clothed and dreadfully boring. She worked at a gas station two blocks away from her apartment and walked there to work the overnight shift. The hours of drunks and druggies and all around losers and this included the drunk frat boys who staggered in all through the night to pee while they waited for their coke dealer in the parking lot. She sat behind the counter and read magazines about celebrities and pregnancies. This night would be no different but she didn’t want to leave her apartment or the comfort of her hundred eyes watching over her in the bedroom.