is it a vacation if you spend it in the pits?
time off swimming in sewers, splashing barefoot in dirty streets
— gutters gushing, flood waters overflowing and too frightened
to feel your face…
eyelids twitching
and overcome with grief
yeah, this isn’t work,
but it still makes you tired, still takes something out of you
in a bigger picture sort of way
I can’t help but feel I’m losing something
on this slumdog sabbatical —
someone rich might call it a getaway,
but the art dogs, we call it different
more like crawling back into the hole
or sleeping under a rock — oh, what a dank and cosy rock…
soft recharge to brace ourselves for more of the thunder
and lightning of public life
nah, there’s no complaining here
any time away is still time to become yourself again,
and ugly as it is to you, this is what I am…
I’ll come to love it soon enough
like the climber loves the granite,
each jagged, sturdy slab
a foothold,
pulling me up higher until I find my place
of peace,
until I can kiss the clouds
and spit down on all the shit below
Garbage Notes:
When you’re a writer, usually writing isn’t the thing that brings you money. Many of us are forced to do other jobs we don’t enjoy just to live. I know that’s, like, totally shocking to the rest of the world. That you’d love something so much and devote your life to it to the point where it’s the only thing you can actually do with any passion and skill and yet you’d still have to work an entire other job just to do the thing that you consider to be your main job—just to exist in the world, really.
It’s kind of absurd and ridiculous and one of those things that I pray and hope our society looks back on in history and sees as one of the true injustices of our time. All the miserable humans having to destroy themselves doing things they hate, like, just to have the time to do things they actually love. But who knows, it takes a long time for shit to change.
Anyway, I would often find myself taking these little “sabbaticals” from whatever job I had at any given time. And instead of taking a break or a vacation like all the other non-writer citizens of the world, I’d devote all the down time to reading, writing and introspection, with very minimal social interaction or communication with the outside world.
I’d pretty much throw myself into this zen pit of cathartic chaos and see what brilliant words sprung forth. Of course it was never glamorous, and it was never actually restful or relaxing as it might seem, but it was necessary.
The slumdog sabbatical brings the introvert writer back to oneself. The chance to shut out the world and focus on the only true thing that matters. The echoes in your mind. The voices in your head. And getting all the toxic sludge out of you so that you might transmute it into something beautiful on the page.
At best my slumdog sabbatical would yield several good poems, maybe a short story or two that I might sell months later. But it never made for nice photos to show people, never led to fun anecdotes to tell the co-workers upon returning to “work”. I’d never return with bright eyes or a glowing tan—evidence that most might expect from a salubrious escape from the grind. No, the writer’s vacation is just that—undisturbed writing. And that never shows on the outside. It’s never pretty. But it’s always needed.
Franco Amati 2023
I like the phrase slumdog sabbatical. It's true. Not all work life is the same. And some people can never take a vacation. Well said fellow writer. The creatives out there will all appreciate and understand this.
What a nice ride through Franco Land!
I can’t wait for my break next month, I’m doing both though, the beach plus writing. We’ll see if I end up with a tan, beach all day, beach all night, writing on the beach sounds amazing.