So it's Saturday night, and I'm not going dancing, which is a little sad, but I've got a book deadline. Sometimes I think I should take a month off anyway--from dancing, I mean--because I appreciate it more. Not just a little more, like Christmas as a little boy. I've done that, gone as long as a month without dancing before and it's ecstatic to feel alive again, but I'm not much in the mood for starving myself while I'm working on a book.

Huh. I just realized that two weeks is about my limit for either of them without serious withdrawal pains. It was a couple years ago that I began to notice that was my writing limit. I can take three or four days off from writing and just love the freedom and the laziness, but around that fourth day, heavy restlessness starts to set in alongside it. I week and I'm really starting to feel it, having trouble sleeping more, snapping at people--out loud or at least in my head--by the start of the second week and just getting unbearably grumbly by two weeks out. Fourteen days and I'm into full-scale self-loathing. Not quite world-loathing--I don't hate the rest of the world, you people just annoy the crap out of me at that point, but I despise myself.

The trouble with pausing on the writing is that it's this weird cosmic-joke kind of dynamic where the further I get from it the more desperately I need it but the harder it is to jump back in. It's just getting out of the pool as a kid all over again, a million fucking times, the same thing--water feels great while you're in, but dry off and get readjusted to the air and it's just hell getting yourself back in again.

I guess an economist would plot the curves out meeting somewhere at two weeks. If one of a thousand different reasons hasn't pulled me back in by that point, the inertia is overwhelming, yet the loathing is even stronger and I force myself back in just to strip it away. One good day and the sun is out again.

OK, now that I think through all that, I realize the dancing I can go much longer. Two weeks I was thinking about as the period I rarely go without, but it has none of the withdrawal stuff. With dancing, the timing has more to do with the proximity of a weekend, and if I take one away, I nearly always let myself have the next one. And I am going a bit stir-crazy by that time, so I know I need it and it would be counterproductive not to, but I'm just restless and agitated and somehow incomplete, nothing approaching the self disgust of the writing withdrawal.

Oh, I just meant to come here for a minute, actually. Just wanted to say that I popped Waking Life into the DVD player for my dinner break, watched the first 15 minutes or so while I munched my homemade burger and veggies and was deeply in love with it already, especially loving the pithy little diss of the ridiculous post-modernist crap, until I hit one remark that irked me. This woman was talking about language and how fascinating it was, but as an aside said how incapable it was of describing most of what it is we feel and experience. God, I hate it when people say that. "No," I want to say, "it's not the language that's incapable. Perhaps it's you." Hahaha. I know that's a little harsh, but my point is that any one of us may be at a loss in a particular situation to convey it, but that's a measure of our inabilities. Someone, somewhere, sometime is going to capture it. Or could if they were in your shoes.

Couldn't they? I think that belief is somehow hardwired inside me as a writer--I have to believe it's possible so that I'll keep giving it a go. I keep coming up short from the full grandeur or simplicity I'd like to capture from each crucial moment, but it's only that belief that I can somehow reach a little further next time and convey it that keeps me clacking away. But for some reason I started rethinking that for a moment this time.

I thought back to the last beautiful perfect moment I couldn't describe, which was last weekend when my friends Daniel and Alejandro came up from Albuquerque unexpected to visit and I took a few hours off to go dancing with them, and . . . well, it was magical, as always, or as usually. I'm not going to attempt to convey it, but the ecstasy of the dancefloor was matched only by the sheer joy and love (yes, platonic love) I felt emanating from them and bouncing oozing out of me in return. And I remember feeling at the moment out exquisite it was and that I noticed at that moment how indescribable it was and that I had no interest in trying to capture it in words, at least not then.

So thinking back on it just now, the Waking Life dialogue faded into the background and I recalled how great it was when I first discovered the dancefloor when I was 19, and how I had all that pain and anger and glee and God knows what other kind of teenage nonsense all bottled up inside me, and the dancefloor was the one place I could express all of it. Purely. And that's the exuberance I've felt from it ever since. It's the one place in the world I feel most alive, and most expressive. All this stuff inside me that just has to get out. That's the only way I know how to say most of it. This way, with the keyboard is a distant second. Distant? I'm hesitant to use that word, because while true, the phrase conjures up the usual meaning which is one thing way out ahead and then all the others somewhere behind in a pack. The situation here is actually one out ahead, the linguistic one way behind, and then a much longer gap before the pack arrives.

Hmmmmm. I may have to rethink that. Sorry. Sex has got to be in there somewhere. And smiles, smirks, squeezes of the shoulder . . . Well, maybe that's the pack. Dancing seems to rank first in my life in terms of satisfaction, followed by writing, and then all the rest of those others.

So it occurred to me--this was all I really wanted to say--that I have this lifelong craving to dance for the same reason I have to write. So how come all the other writers aren't littering the dancefloors? Why aren't the professional dancers writing novels in their spare time? Seems odd.

---

A little aside. Still wondering if I'll ever be able to write a satisfactory story about dancing. To convey with one the power of conveying in the other, that's a toughie. I've tried. I wrote a story about it in grad school--didn't hate the attempt, but didn't do it justice, either. Maybe I should just try to capture a little piece of it next time.

That's why I admire the film Billy Elliot so much, though. Captured it. Totally. I was awestruck there in my theatre seat: They did it, they capture the ecstasy of dancing to a little boy. Of course they were not limited to words. Much easier to do on film, I think, but someday maybe I'll do it on the page.

I'll let you know.

---

OK, break's over. Three more pages to get out before I sleep tonight. Normally that would be a lot, but I know just what I want to say, and worked out the finer points on my bike ride just before dinner. Damn, I missed the sunset to spend this time with you. I miss most of them, but it was just started and I had this urge to sit out on my balcony in the cool breeze and just soak it in, but I also had to say this, so here I was.