Assimilating the spots of time we all live through, some people are lucky enough to spots of time that either are, or become, holy to them. I have a few. The spring of 1998 in State College, Pennsylvania was a holy time for me then, and remains one to me now. Odd, because I should’ve been graduating, and was not. Yet I was graduating— from a realm of confusion and discomfort, a perpetual inability to express myself in writing, into a new, expansive realm where I could take language and go wherever I wanted to with it. The French Symbolists were with me. I still had the Beats around. Eliot I was just starting to grok. Yeats and Romanticism were still in the future. But when I got picked up by a writing whirligig or virus, living in a bedsit flat in North Halls, a little slice of a room, I got dropped into a place where I felt the earth move with my pen. Clean was my first masterpiece. Absurdist, bizarre, but a masterpiece nonetheless. All brought on by extensive donning of black leather pants. Daddio. Don’t keep ‘em on for three months. Clean heralded a sense of absolute rebirth. Enhanced by the extremely intense, bewitching sense of earth magic in central Pennsylvania. Great weather, in the spring of ’98, Centre County. Seventy-five and sunny all the time. I moved into yet another South Atherton Street sublet. The daily writing jags were about a task I could do, from a sense of manhood earned. R.E.M. is, of course, perfect to hear in a little college town. Holy. And my choice for the spring of ’98 happened to be Reckoning. So that the best of my time in State College was always spent floating slightly above the ground. If you can earn that sense of floatation with serious creativity, you have gained religion.
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