UNSTEADY ON by David Wolf
Youth felt crooked then and feels crooked now. Not in the way that New York City (once home) is, was, and will remain crooked. In various ways and perhaps none, all depending on our expectations, asinine and understandable all at once. I sought to intensify my views on life as early as I could, as soon as I grew dimly aware of what that meant, jogging into the grey fuzz flying off the newly baseless conceptualizations, concentrating on a decaying tree here, a coarse cluster of beliefs there. Some of my strengths wane, some wax and those are some facts, I guess. These are patient reflections, awaiting sufficient ice to form on the semi-frozen pond of non-narrative, waiting for the body to give way to a story or two. I have encountered/endured many approaches to treating the great textbook themes: innocence and experience, conformity and rebellion, culture and identity, love and hate, life and death, given my line of “work” as a writer and a teacher of literature. “Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do,” said Voltaire, who used the word sturgeon at least once in his writing to my knowledge and likely stood at a window one morning watching the rain, thinking, I mean who hasn’t?
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