Dusty Typewriter

I start to blow the dust off and I look up in the air to see the dust scurrying about the room like the purple dots that seem to line the inside of your eyelids when you close your eyes after looking at the sun for too long. There is a binding warm/cold feeling when I sit in front of my typewriter when I come home. It is like a boy who comes home from a long roadtrip and sits down to write, having to pick through his brain.

There is this documentary I watched once, called, "Thumbing for a Musical Trip", and it's about this teenager, John, who is discovered by one of the head-hanchos who works for Rolling Stone magazine. John tours with this band, called Belle Doctor, and becomes really good friends with the band members, but especially the lead guitarist, Billy Thallow. John's shown at the end of the movie, sitting in front of his typewriter, reflecting back on the trip, editing his writing that he had written on Post-It notes. The movie shows John holding this one polaroid of Billy in this retro pink vest, scandalously making out with one or more groupies. And the typewriter is shown, out of focus, behind John, but if you press Pause on your VCR, there's this split second where you can read what it says on the typewriter, and it says something like, "After one of the shows Belle Doctor played in Guatemala's Mazatenango, Thallow and I streaked butt-naked across the Guatemalan desert on a beer run. The next..." And you can't read the rest. It's blocked out by John's hand. But if I had to guess, John had probably written something like, "The next day, we found a group of girls on the side of the desert while driving in our tour bus back to San Pedro and we couldn't think of anything better to do than to play Spin the Bottle in the middle of the desert." It makes you think if Rolling Stone would actually think that's great shit and put it in their magazine. Who knows? I mean, John did become famous off that article. He toured with Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd - all because he wrote an article about how he streaked with this small band that no one cares about across this desert in a town no one has ever heard of.

When I sit in front of my typewriter, I feel something very similar to what John probably felt. John probably was in a very nostalgic position when he's shown sitting in front of his typewriter, reflecting back on all the good memories of streaking.

I like to leave my window open and let the fall breeze's old and classy smell come drifting into the room. This fall smell hovers over my typewriter as I pin up pictures on the wall right in front of my typewriter. I like to pin up vintage polaroids of my friends and clippings from magazines, showing some Asian muscle man summitting Everest. I light my incense that's called, Christmas Kiss, and the smoke scurries about the room and meshes with the typewriter's scurrying dust.