I’m lonely tonight, feeling isolated. I usually cherish my solitude as a chance for creativity or just productivity, though it’s been harder to feel that way since Tasha died. I mean there’s living alone and then there’s living alone, you know?

I remember when I first started getting into writing as an avocation in college. Being a poet was a tribal thing, though my tribe at the time was a small pack of soft, privileged white kids, who thought we had parted a veil and gazed on Being, wearing white light folded, supine on the dappled surface of Chico Creek. Bad poets, every one. A few had promise, but I don’t know what became of them. Now it’s hard to be a tribal writer, find your place and dig in. The internet isn’t much help, though you might hope it would be. So many voices, as Kerouac put it, “dealing with the pit and prune juice of poor beat life itself in the god awful streets of man.”

Which brings me to the topic at hand, bowling. That’s something I could be doing tonight instead of what I’m doing tonight. I could be someplace loud, with lots of people. The sound of the balls on the lanes, and the crash. Beer. My own bowling ball, so infinitely, intractably black that my hand would almost disappear every time I reached for it. Drying my hands in the little air vents, and finding just the right board on the floor from which to begin my attack. And you know that once I do, there is no hope.

I’m not sure I like bowling. I wasn’t bad in college, but that was a long time ago. I took the class at City College, to get past the PE requirement and transfer to Chico State. The last time I tried the game (don’t call it a sport) was early in 2005 and I sucked. But I was almost a twentieth of a ton heavier then, so God knows.

What I’m doing – besides writing this post – is trying to conjure a point of focus, a chord to strike, on which to build the last of a series of very short stores, story poems, which I started working on about a year and a half ago. A few months ago, I made a manuscript of them, enough to submit. But I need a knotted thread to tie them around – a title piece to set the tone. I’ve been mulling it over for a couple of months, and thought I had it when I was up in Northern California last month. I thought it was voices in the trees. So I wrote that, and then another piece, but that’s not it either. Now I think it’s images, photos, and how they bind us to the world.

Now I need to go out on the balcony for some fresh air, because I’m picturing a guy bowling alone, drying his hands with the little vent, taking a pull from his Bud Light, reaching into the darkness for his ball. See, being a writer of uncommonly pallid imagination, he forgot to write any friends into the scene.