He wrote:
Americans are guilt obsessed and sex obsessed and the two clash, sparking fury like swords in the night.
He deleted night and replaced it with darkness finding the latter word more appealing to the sense of emptiness he felt when he reflected on the state of the American people. The latter felt like there was no hope while the former suggested day might come. As he sat staring out his second story window towards rows and rows of identical windows and rooms filling the Arizona streets he decided, if only to himself, that it was long past a chance for daylight.
Ahmir didn’t arrive to this conclusion or even this place by choice. His mother brought him here in his pre-teens, primarily because of the real estate market. His parents sold their shitty little two bedroom in Leimart Park, CA for 750,000 dollars. He remembered the moment, because he’d thought at the time that his family was millionaires, even if the sale price was missing a zero. It helped his imagination that the money they got from the sale was enough to buy a house four times as large in an Arizona suburb. Now they lived in a home that was over 5,000 square feet with three cars all bought and paid for, slowly depreciating in the driveway. He wrote:
If not for the advent of media technology like X (formerly known as twitter) and Instagram, and a host of more directly sex-focused interchanges, perhaps the culture would allow itself to be centered in reality as opposed to being fooled into thinking the digital realities thrust forward are real and thus are ample grounds upon which to wage the new culture wars.
His hand hovered over the keyboard, trying to find his next thought. He was tired. It was barely 5 AM. He hadn’t slept more than three hours, tossing and turning and sweating even in the chill of the AC. His mind raged, but he could not find the words to sate himself.
Some Thoughts:
- Just barely a minute left here on the clock and I wanted to bring forward an update and an explanation. Ahmir is going to be a part of this summer’s novel. This section may even find it’s way into the text in some form. I made the decision to ‘write what I know’ and moved the location of the novel from Texas to Arizona. The politics of Texas were what drew me to the location, but living here has shown me that I need not look far from home for what I seek…