05-12-25
(From a roadside center in Ohio)
I am listening to an audio book.
I am a some what clumsy late-comer to audiobooks. What kept me away for so long? I adore those obvious, probably mundane charms of print books: the weight, the smell, the silent voices spoken in my mind's ear. Yes, above all it is that seductive and unique quality of books to transform me into a co-creator that I love. The "paint by numbers" that comes with reading a story. The author has given my imagination all of the tools to manifest what isn't there. While I hazard the graceless overlapping of a mixed metaphor, the book is a playground for the imagination to run wild. Well, sort of wild. It's more like a play ground, it is a cultivated space. It isn't the wide open timeless arena of a rural childhood, or the borderless infinity in a wild animal's gaze. The book is a playground, not a play ground. I've seen children seem to long for the stable, guided, and controlled liberty of the playground. Remember the swings, the slide, the see-saw, and the merry-go-round? Do you remember the feeling of freedom without awareness of the highly curated protected zone? Monkey-bars instead of trees, slides instead of waterfalls, and turf or rubber instead of grass? That is what the author provides to me. The author created the playground-cum-canvas, the tools, the story, and the numbers on which to the paint the very colors they gave me. These inconspicuous elements are provocative. I heard the voices. These characters, the narrator, they are not intoned in my voice, yet nor are they the voices of others. Not simply an Ersatz but a simulacrum. I have transformed into a co-creator in that space. That is alluring. Perhaps, it is the fear of loss, the loss of that co-creator agency that kept me away for so long.
I didn't come here to gnaw the rag on my experience with audio books. It's Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She inspired me (I am also a late comer to her works). I am reading (listening to) "Americanah". I finished "Notes on Grief" two months ago, and I find myself smitten by her writing. I feel inspired to write. The needle point precision of her observations are in perfect balance of profound and casual, if such a thing is possible.
Her writing has a way of beseeching me. It calls me to write something, as if I had something to say: something worth reading. So I type on my laptop in a rest-stop off the bland and monotonous interstate highway in Ohio. Sandusky, Ohio. Somewhere and nowhere, but not anywhere.
I am making the drive again, that drive. The drive that has become habit, routine. The round-trip drive from Michigan to New York. 1200 miles, practically a straight line from Toledo, Ohio to New Jersey. I've lost count of my r/t drives. Sometimes it's once a month. It's even been twice in 3 weeks at times. Hundreds of dollars in petrol and tolls; an uncountable cumulation of hours, no: days, no: weeks of my life in a car, all for sake of my career as a musician. My free-lance life, and my attachment to New York. Adichie left me so profoundly inspired that I took my laptop out to type this, here of all places. I won't take too much time, it is an 11-hour drive, after all. I battle the will to type and the noxious fumes of burning breakfast foods, stale coffee and putrid stench of a toilette placed inhumanly close to the food court. I am disgusted and determined.
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