a thing that happened in september

I met him on the sidewalk on a warm night in September, a few days after she left me. He was liquored, looking for a fight or some weed, wearing a charcoal suit; I was ready for anything, and expecting the soft autumn pulse to shake the leaves from the trees, expecting it to stir my blood into a frenzy.

We walked back to his house, into his basement, talking small, calling everyone that we knew that was holding, everyone. He hadn’t shaved that day, and kept rubbing his stubble after he clicked his cell shut. I asked him if he could grow a full beard, told him that I wished I could.

Later, after we had smoked some pot that he bought with two twenties and a White Stripes album, he told me about laying out surveying lines in the north, about smoking cigarettes while your back is cushioned by a pine trunk, about getting the boot from residence because he punched a hole through a wall while drinking whisky.

The basement had taken on a lot of smoke, and I only noticed this when I was having trouble seeing him. He was gray, spectral, for that moment before I realized what had happened. I told him it was smoky, and he told me that the only way to get rid of the smoke was to smoke more.

I told him that she didn’t care, had never cared. He packed a bowl, and told me to smoke it. I did, and as I did, he told me that there was no reason to get caught up on her, that she wasn’t worth it.

As we walked to the bar, he loosened his tie, smoked another cigarette, punched my shoulder. I didn’t want to thank him; I told him I’d buy him a pint. The air was thick with the odour of rotting leaves and young lives.

for the love of god do not read this post!

Initially, when I think of non-fiction, my first response is that it is a genre with loose borders. Over the last few years I've been thinking a lot about what it means to write within the borders of truth. Well, truth is just so fucking elusive. Everywhere I go people are standing on the corner screaming, sometimes shouting from rooftops, that they've found the one and only truth. Well, I'm sure that they have. I mean, is there ever any way that I can say that they haven't? I'm not too sure I could tell them definitively that that have found no truth, that what they've found is religion, a notion easily confused with truth.

My first real encounter with what truth really is occurred during my first non-fiction class:

I got really drunk and took some 2CI (a potent combination of experimental drugs that users have described as feeling like a mixture of acid and mushrooms). About an hour in the walls had already melted into the tables and I was wading through a dreamy rainbow sludge. It took me a year fully exploring drugs to come to the conclusion that there really is no definitive truth, that even what we see before may not be the same thing that someone else might see.

My twisted version of the truth is just as truthful as other versions of the truth. So, when it comes to non-fiction, I feel there are almost endless possibilities: more grounded than fiction or poetry, yet capable of containing each of those within its borders. I've especially become fond of the idea of creative speculation based on factual events within a "true" story.

I've also been thinking about a innovative way to combine both poetry, drama, screenplay etc. with non-fiction. I've really been trying hard to find a way for all of these to fit together as some sort of hybrid Frankenstein text. And, hopefully, I will succeed one day in creating this super beast that then goes on to kill my girlfriend and then decides to chill out in the bushes perving on some old guy and his children.

jordan