The Boredom Diaries: Reanimated.

It’s been almost a year since I’ve conjured an unsolicited narrative. Simply put, I just lost the inspiration to write. There was no definitive reason. Being busy, maybe?
I read enough, outside ideas flowing in and out daily. This is what I have always used as a previous catalyst.
I’ve been traveling enough. A sight. A conversation. An instance. When happening, proves insignificant. Yet later, churns in memory, propositioning the cerebrum to expand outward onto paper.
Or maybe its seasonal? It being too hot, or too cold. Forcing me inside, where I can only fight some sort of creativity for so long.

Almost a year ago, an old friend forfeited a envelope of mementos. He and I, during the summer of 1998, ended up traveling across the US for six weeks. It was a big deal leaving, for me, the first time on the road for an extended amount of time. I had just turned twenty one. An age, that, for some reason felt like a midlife crisis. Of burgeoning from childhood, into some sort of civilian, predicted adulthood that I feared deeply.

In the envelope, buried among punk zines, photos, and old show flyers, was a poetry chapbook I had put together during the Spring of that year.
In anticipation of turning twenty one, in a nervous anticipation of leaving for the whole summer, I penned fifteen poems.
If memory serves correct, I printed twenty five of these chapbooks. And I gave all twenty five away, not keeping one for myself.
This had always been a terrible habit: creating, writing, sharing, yet never keeping a record for myself.
On opening the chapbook, slowly reading each entry all the way through, doubling back, and rereading again, I was delivered back to kernels of memory, the impetus to how I felt then. And now, much later, churning into what I’ve come to feel currently: of ethics, on faith, of politics, on a life that demands making some sort of sense out of it, against the odds of a collective, living memory that, for the most part, does not give a fuck about you.

This chapbook was somehow an odd antidote for a creative paralysis, a treasure trove to fleeting instances that had much more of an effect on me than I thought.
Each entry, delving into some sort of existential issue.
Each entry, asking, subtly, for a response.
The following posts, fifteen over the course of the rest of this year, are my attempt to answer that silence.

-Matt Coplon

6:07pm
May, 16th. 2015.

Matt Coplon

Work by day. Ride by evening. Write by night.