My Happy Place...

...which is also sort of my sad place. Got some great additions to my contemplative music selection and have been listening them all afternoon. Eric Clapton's tragic but beautiful song, "Tears in heaven", most of my Neil Diamond classics, and Staind's two big hits, "It's been a while" and "Outside". Also got the best of my boy 50 Cent for when I am feeling all hyped up and gangsta...

Additionally, a friend was thoughtful enough to bring me an optical mouse so my layout blitz this weekend is going to be made so much easier. I am going to spend the weekend at a place that has special memories for me, and if you are reading this, you know where I am talking about...I haven't been back there since.

It's going to be me, my music, my solitude, my stories. The final crafting of Fictions tomorrow and while there is a sort of relief coming in, I also feel a distinct sadness. As the creator of a work of art, you develop a paternal sort of feeling over the work you put out. And publication is like sending your child our children out into the world and hoping that they do well.

The finishing of Fictions also marks the end of an era for me. After this, I will no longer by the angry young man - I will have to grow up, shoulder the sort of responsibility commensurate with my capacity. Essentially, the events in sum of the upcoming month are going to constitute a significant rite of passage for me.

Here is part of the plot of the larger tale, ladies and gentlemen. The prodigy - after five years in the cocoon of a strangling, mundane but at times beautiful domesticity - has planned his emergence to coincide with the most opportune convergence of the stars in heaven. With the upcoming CARIFESTA, he will be both at home and within his element. Old friendships will be renewed and strengthened, new alliances will be made.

This is the time that is most ripe for the strange alchemy that turns the curse of the Muse into the gift it was originally meant to be. And is not that it cannot fail, but if it does, there can be no more apt an epigraph to his literary career than Ovid's homage to another young man who decided to take the reins of destiny into his own hands:

"Hic situs est Phaeton, currus auriga paterni,
Quem si non tenuit, magnis tamen excidit ausis."

Except of course that the chariot is his own, any paternity being the self who years ago fathered the self he is today.

This is the last post on Cumae for what will be some time, the next most likely being my announcement of the date the CARIFESTA Secretariat would have given me for the launch. Out for now. I'm off to my happy place tomorrow.