If, when I have no choice, I work on projects out in public, I often get distracted. Here's one such day:
She made everyone uncomfortable with her coat. It’s odd how a coat can make you feel a certain way. If it’s puffy and looks of animals, you know how to feel. If it looks strong but gentle leather, you know how to feel. If it looks worn, weathered, torn, and has a swirling sour taste to the area around it when you breathe—like the one she wore—you also know how to feel. But, do you really? How do I know how I should feel of her appearance and, rather of course, the oddity in her movements and actions?
She seemed educated and forceful of knowledge. Is that the way she argues the way she is, or is that just how she lives: gathering her coat and infesting into other’s personal boxes—infiltrated now by only a putrid smell?
Who am I, asked her coat? And what should I do when it comes near, asked mine.
I couldn't get her out of my head to write what I had set about writing. I am now fixated on this lady, who is one of those people that you wished would just walk away… When I had first walked in, she had told me that the weather seemed tropical in opposition to the last few days… I had responded, sadly. What was I to do?
And another day:
My writing is raw. It’s learned and shoveled forth like an orphaned boy. I sit outside a great hall with my rags and hunger—I thirst too. I can see the concert pianist from a small window on the north side. I watch her fingers move; I listen. I learn. I cannot tell you the notes that beat through my heart. I know the good when I hear it. I must make my own music.
I use music as an analogy to writing for very serious reasons. Music is ineffable. Any expression that is as almost entirely inexpressible with words as music, is both the writer’s greatest foe and, for the nature (and fondness) of trying to express the ineffable within such sought after words, its greatest ally.