Update: I still feel awful.

I have been moaning and groaning and moping around the house because I have the flu. Yes, that flu. But I seriously need to get over myself. Here are some things that have been jumbling around my head today:

Yogi Tea puts little sayings on their tea bag tags. It's one of my favorite things about drinking their teas. Mine today says:

Live from your heart and you will be most effective.

And I like that.

Also, my crush on Jack Kerouac has been reignited.

I was reading his list of 30 essentials for his "Spontaneous Prose" technique and I love them, so I thought I'd share.

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

The man makes it sound so easy to be filled with the right words, places, and characters. I need to have a secret notebook again. Why is writing so scary sometimes? I owe some essays to someone and I have them, just sitting here, but have issues letting them go and being done with them. I miss my writing classes in the Forest Theatre at UNC, where it all seemed so easy. We would have great discussions, surrounded by trees, and you couldn"t help but write pages and pages. Now...well, things are different in the real world. I need to shake things up a little.

Here's a little more Jack for you: