Why do we push our lovers away? Is it arrogance? Pain? The fear of heartache? Abandonment? Or worse, the idea that love and all its incarnations are folly? Why did I attempt, in vain, to distance myself from both of them this morning? Why, in God’s name, did I try to live without love?
I sent a message to my Parisian this morning: “I have been inspired to write the greatness of life. Inspired wholly by you, my dear.”
I don’t pretend to be the greatest of writers. I simply write. Writing is who I am, and my 
charge in life, like many writers, is to live life and express it through words to my audience. It doesn’t matter the genre or the subject. I must feel the anguish of life and expose myself in order to place it into words so that others can experience it as well. I suppose I could argue that it’s my charge, that it’s some romantic ideal. But it’s not. It’s an awful existence. Full of pain and sorrow, and I suppose, like the sun that breaks through a deep, cloudy day, my writing will move you. Move you to be a bigger, better person. Perhaps to inspire you to follow your dreams. And in the very least to take a few minutes out of your busy life to sit with me for a few minutes and let me 
say the things which break my heart. And so to the thousands and thousands and thousands of people that read my posts, I want you to know that I’ll never disappoint you, because I cherish each and every one of you, more than I’m certain you’ll ever know. I write to you, personally, my life, and I always consider you to be my good friends.
My writing has taken on a new maturity of late. A depth which is so exposing, so honest, so brutal. I’ve found an inner strength. An honesty. My heart aches with longing, like a leashed dog, I pull and pull and pull at the chain, but I’m never freed. I want to run like galloping horses, to feel the freedom of winds in my mane, ton sweat out the pain of constraint and be fully expressed.
To quote some famous authors:
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
–Sylvia Plath
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
–Jack Kerouac
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
–Anais Nin
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
–Maya Angelou
And my favourite:
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
–Ernest Hemingway
Recently I’ve been intrigued with the ideas of creativity and greatness. What most of us think of as creativity is limited to the arts like writing, painting, dancing, acting, and sculpting. What people don’t consider is athletics. But think of the greats like Michael Jordan, Johnny Orr, Alex Rodriguez, Mario Andretti, Richard Petty, Joe Montana, Brett Favre, Jean-Claude Killy, Apollo Ono, Evgeni Plushenko, and Michelle Kwan.
he’d practised hundreds of times before; creating the hole requires a pulling guard to double team the defensive tackle and the center to move the nose guard to the right causing a gap in the defensive line and subsequent hole; theoretically, in the gap normally covered by the middle linebacker reading a run, but who now reads a pass from the secondary, yelling “pass pass!” The safety bumps and runs with the wide receivers as the tight end drops back to move the defensive right tackle to protect the quarterbacks blind side, while the fullback picks up a nimble cornerback blitzing wide, but the fullback buries him in the backfield; the the handoff finally happens just as the hole appears like an apparition in a dense fog; a hole, first imagined by a coach on a sheet of paper, placed in a playbook as “off-tackle left on two”; practised hundreds of times but
never recognized by the RB; but now, the hole has opened and he’s about to step through the paradigm and into a new future; what’s on the other side of the hole, what does the future hold; this is creativity at its rawest form; this is the result of imagination and practice; it’s a coach’s hypotheses, an offensive lines determination, and an RB’s commitment to his future; yet, he hesitates until he hears his conscience telling to run through the hole; then he runs headlong through the gap while realizing that the 
hole isn’t the future, it’s simply a doorway, his future lies on the other side of the threshold.
imperceptible henna to tangerine to apricot. They knew it was coming, this night.
Tonight I’m staring right into an abyss whose depth is wholly uncertain.
prom date, recipient of the first kiss, Girl Scout, Teddy Roosevelt (yes, really), Girl Scout Leader, Sinéad O’Conner, full back, Metta World Peace ,
offensive line coach, movie star, Burgess Meredith, Opera Star, Ronald Braunstein, famous orchestra conductor, infamous commuter train conductor or any one of the other 25% of our world’s population. How about the other 75% of the world’s population loosen the reins of their prejudice.
dreadfully antagonistic and well-rehearsed sequence of deplorable behavior: Vanish, spot, affirm, invite, tempt, yield, pity, agony, masquerade, endure, discredit, and pluck. And each incarnation ripped yet another piece of moral character from me until sometime in the early nineties I concluded that we were no more to each other than a dealer and an addict, and he was always, always willing to deal, not out of compassion for me, but to satisfy some dark hunger, a craving, maybe a need.
other. I finding love and partnership and success in Chicago. He and his art landed in New York. It wasn’t his drawings they placed atop acrylic pedestals. For dollar bills he ignored their probing fingers; for five’s he forgot their foraging. We never discussed the activities associated with higher denominations but he emphasized they were few and far between (“even for someone that looks like me!”), a thinly veiled plea for adoration of which I ignored and which subsequently produced a stifling silence as though the bridge between us had been washed away by indifference.
hands down the most lucrative (and dangerous). His last trip to Chicago was a bona fide performance, secretly cast by the Chicago Vice Squad who raided the place and arrested the lot and charged them with indecency (the cheek dividing string of his g-string was 0.25″ too narrow to entirely cover his anus). I was called and took clothes and cash and bailed him out of jail. As the sun started to peek above Lake Michigan we were driving north on Lake Shore Drive when he said, “You know, I think it’s time to hang up the g-string.”
HARLAN DIDRICKSON 