diaryofarthurjones

[diaryofarthurjones]

bob james

[diaryofarthurjones]

stop the rain

[diaryofarthurjones]

death

This will likely be a recurring topic. It's been on my mind a lot lately, sometimes to the point of depression. Example: I’ll hear news of a tragic accident, like that helicopter crashing into a passenger plane, killing 67 at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. No lie, this happened. And I’m here thinking, “Hey, I spent a year in D.C. That could have been me.” Selfish, I know, but isn’t that how most of us react to such news? We place ourselves there, or one of our loved ones. Whenever I hear of a school shooting, I think of my kids. That could have happened. Could still happen.

I think about the reality of death, that it’s coming for us all, that we don’t know when it’s coming unless we take direct action to speed things up. I could wake up tomorrow, go to the gym, and have a heart attack. That recently happened to a childhood friend. He was thirty-three years old.

The truth is, I think a lot about my grandfather dying at fifty-nine. Were he alive today, he would be seventy-five, a good thirteen (or fourteen?) years younger than my wife’s maternal grandmother, who’s still alive and active.

I think about the point of going through the daily grind—working, working, working—with very little leisure, seemingly, at least. Sure, I appreciate that I’m much more fortunate than many people in the world, especially living in the U.S. and being a U.S. citizen (this isn’t a rah-rah USA chant kind of statement…just a fact). But why would I want to spend my time thinking about the spreadsheet I need to work on for a job that I neither love nor hate—it’s just something that pays the bills and I happen to be good at it. It doesn’t seem fair to know that I could go to work all day tomorrow and get hit by a car that evening. What a fucking waste of time.

Anyway, that’s what happens. I start spiraling. I know it’s all in my head, but still, the sad truth is that we will all one day perish from this earth, and there isn’t really much we can do about it, unless we somehow solve this riddle—if that’s even what we want.

[diaryofarthurjones]

I'm starting Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman for the third time, I think. I have a problem with starting books, putting them down, and jumping to the next, over and over. I'm sick of it, so this is my attempt to read Amusing Ourselves straight through without picking up another book (I will likely fail).

With this new effort to write more and think out loud in the form of a Tumblr blog, I may offer my thoughts on the text. But remember: I'm thinking out loud. I may change my mind and be inconsistent (I'm talking to myself here).

That's the point of this project, anyway.

(update, a few days later: I failed)

[diaryofarthurjones]

A random thought worth documenting: I think it may be important to shift one’s thinking from “I have to do this” to “I get to do this.” This isn’t to excuse the evil that pervades the earth (meaning, if you work for a shitty company, saying “I get to work today” and embracing the fact that your alive shouldn’t mean putting up with nonsense). It’s just, well, easier to think that I get the opportunity to wake up in the morning and get ready for work as opposed to saying, “fuck, what is the point of this rat race?”

[diaryofarthurjones]

sunday morning

[diaryofarthurjones]

a random saturday in february

My wife is at the gym. I'm sitting in the basement typing these words. I'm listening to music, trying to find a sample. Currently on the JBL speaker: "Mighty Sceptres: Butterfly." I think I want to sample it, but it will be tricky. I want to try micro-chopping—a term I learned earlier today when watching a YouTube video on J Dilla, the Detroit legend and GOAT producer. One of my children, E, is sitting on the couch behind me playing Roblox on my phone. My other child, N, is upstairs watching Hot Wheels on Netflix, although he's too quiet for my liking. Okay, I just heard his voice. And also: J Dilla's "Sunbeams" popped up on my YouTube playlist. Hmmm. Makes me wonder if the algorithm is penetrating my thoughts.

I feel the need to describe what's on my desk. From left to right: ThinkVision monitor, HeyDude bottle opener (makes me want a drink...will get to that later), a light blue lighter with a pattern I'm too lazy to describe, a remote for the space heater behind me, BlueStik reusable adhesive putty, a product I use to put photos on the wall in front of the MacBook Air, 16", I'm currently typing on, Apple AirPods, the local Sunday paper, on two piles of books I plan on reading, one day:

(I got distracted for maybe twenty minutes...)

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

The Dominican Racial Imaginary: Surveying The Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola by Milagros Ricourt

The Rebels' Clinic: The Revolutionary Life of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz

The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About The Good Life by Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh

Capitalist Humanitarianism by Lucia Hulsether

An Expert Sudoku book that was likely grabbed at an airport (no puzzles have been solved at this time)

Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

Simulations by Jean Baudrillard

The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois

Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism by Amelia Horgan

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

The Real Work: On The Mystery of Mastery by Adam Gopnik

"Rerun," issue number forty-nine by n+1 magazine

Another puzzle book

I've finished none of the above and likely won't for the foreseeable future. As you can tell, I'm easily distracted and I know myself (although I hope to prove myself wrong).

No lie, I was just on YouTube for five minutes. This is proof of what technology is doing to us. We can think that we have control. We don't. We don't.

I should be writing this in a Word document with the computer on airplane mode.

But I'm not ready for all of that yet.

[diaryofarthurjones]

Joint in hand, heater on, birds singing, reading Vasily Grossman, and trying not to think about work.

[diaryofarthurjones]

I don’t believe in fate, I think, but whilst waiting for a match to load on Call of Duty, I grabbed the biggest book from a pile of books of brought from upstairs. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler. When I opened the book to chapter one, the words “This will be the first novel I ready in 2025.” No lie. I don’t remember when I wrote that. But considering it’s February and I’ve yet to read a novel, let alone finish a book, I might as well make the last self proud.

[diaryofarthurjones]

I’m starting a new project. I’m going to write every day and try to capture what it feels like to be inside of my head. It shouldn’t make sense (likely because I feel incapable of writing coherently).It’s my get out free jail card, so to speak. I want to avoid feeling like what I write could be written by a clever six year old.

I’m also writing this on tumblr because I feel obligated to. It reminds me of one of Rembert Browne’s reasons for writing his blog 500 Days Asunder. That is: “I considered keeping a diary or writing a journal, but when it’s just for my eyes, I get shockingly lazy (write for 2 straight days, get really proud of myself, and take 3 months off…)”

So, yeah.

The other reason is that I’ve called myself a writer for years (only ever to myself and a handful of friends and family) and haven’t really written. I’m about to be thirty-four years old in March, which means I’m closer to death and have yet to produced that novel. And sure, maybe I’m being too hard on myself, but the truth is the truth: I don’t write as often as I should. I don’t hold myself accountable. I overanalyze and overthink and think that I’m bad at writing.

This is the usual trap.

And so the goal is not only to write more but to overcome my fear. My fear of someone close to me reading. My fear of protecting myself from humiliation.

Let’s see how long this will last.

[diaryofarthurjones]

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It all began when Arthur finally accepted the inevitable fact of death. This is a terrible truth many love to ignore, and one Arthur believed only happened to other people. When he’d explain it to others, he tried to make it feel like a Marvel movie, saying something along the lines—though never the same way twice—that when you die in this world, your consciousness moves to a parallel universe, or another timeline, or something, so you never realize you’ve died. Technically, you die, but you never know it. Of course, there were obvious flaws in this theory. What happens in old age? If your consciousness moves to a parallel universe because you died of old age in this one, does that mean there are universes where people live forever? Arthur never had an answer when asked. He’d just shrug and say, “Likely,” and leave it at that.

The truth was that Arthur’s life changed when he acknowledged his own fear of death. He was thirty-two, sitting in his shed, the only place in the house where he could find peace and quiet—and smoke weed. The kids were tearing it up inside, running around like maniacs, while the dogs barked at neighbors who passed by the house every day. Arthur was thinking about this when a Nipsey Hussle song came on. It reminded him of the sad fact that Hussle was no longer living, shot and killed at thirty-three. Then he thought about Jesus dying at thirty-three, which led him to looking up who else died at that age (Sam Cooke, Donny Hathaway). He thought about his grandfather dying from a heart attack, or a broken heart, depending on who you asked, at fifty-nine. Which meant Arthur could suffer the same fate in twenty-six years, or next year. It was all too much to think about, especially when he thought about his children’s inevitable deaths, knowing that as he grew older, so would they. And then he thought about his mother, twenty-one years older, only six years away from fifty-nine. Would she die when Arthur was thirty-eight?

And then there was his wife. The thought of dying before or after her depressed him. The only comfort he found was imagining them growing old together and hopefully dying together in their late nineties, in bed, cuddling. A nice thought, immediately ruined by the realization that if that vision came true, his own parents, aunts, uncles, possibly siblings and friends, would be dead or near it by then. More depressing still was the thought of not being remembered.

He didn’t care about fame or being known outside his circle of family and friends, but he hoped that his descendants would be interested in who he was—not because he founded a tech company, but because they shared a common history of being on this earth. Are people only interested in reading about things more entertaining, like a murder mystery, or a formulaic romance guaranteed to tug at your feelings? Arthur figured he could find these answers if he spent time researching. He imagined that in academic journals, he’d find papers on what it means to create art that defies the urge to entertain for entertainment’s sake. But Arthur was too lazy, and that laziness was something he wanted to capture in his writing. How does one portray laziness in a text? Someone who’s too lazy to do the research, but still wants to write, just writes without research. How do you capture that in a text?

It seemed to Arthur that there was a burden on the writer to craft the text purposefully. If the reader is meant to be confused, then the writer should intend for that confusion. But what about when confusion comes from carelessness or bad writing—does that make it unworthy of being read? These were the thoughts that typically plagued Arthur when he thought about writing, preventing him from moving forward, from ever crafting the world he hoped his descendants might one day read.

In the shed, Arthur sat on the floor in front of a space heater, reading Days of Distraction by Alexandra Chang. On page five, he made a mental note to remember a specific sentence one character said: “We have to realize that no matter how small or large our actions, everything we do matters. The moment you forget that, the moment you put that aside, your life becomes erratic.” Arthur stared at the sentence, thinking about how he could incorporate it into his own novel. It was the perfect sentence at the perfect time, urging him to continue the project.

He imagined a little version of himself standing on his shoulder, urging him to keep writing, to stop worrying that the sentences were poorly written. At the end of the day, no one might ever read these words, and it was only a first draft. Upon revision, he could refine those sentences, make them clearer, more legible, even more entertaining, though that wasn’t necessarily the aim. How can you write a story without writing? How can you worry about the craft of every single sentence? He thought about that sentence again: “We have to realize that no matter how small or large our actions, everything we do matters.” He sat up, grabbed his lighter, which read “Shell yeah!,” picked up his half-smoked joint, and lit it. He took a deep inhale and blew the smoke out slowly. He looked down at his phone and reread the sentence he had just written. He took another hit, then checked the word count—about a thousand. He wondered about the future of this text, whether this sentence would even make it.

He knew he was overthinking it. He knew this sentence wouldn’t survive revision, and yet he continued to write as if it would. That was the writing process. If he got stuck on a single sentence, he’d never finish the story. All the reader would get is a collection of words that captured what it meant to be inside Arthur Jones’s head.

And maybe that was the goal.

The next morning, Arthur woke up in a haze. He was tired, groggy, dehydrated, sad, a little depressed. The first thing he did was grab his phone, open a meditation app, and press play on whatever popped up first: “Discover the importance of carrying a light attitude in life.” He swung his feet off the bed, lifted his arms in a stretch, groaning lightly. Sunlight bled through the tiny cracks in the blackout shades. Arthur walked to the window, opened the shades, and thought about how he would write about this moment. He thought about all the books he’d read where sunlight slanted through blinds at a particular angle, or some variation of that sentence. He knew he should include it in his novel, but he couldn’t understand why writers felt the need to mention sunlight through blinds. Is it because readers can relate to it? Surely not everyone has blinds. What would the sentence look like for someone who didn’t? “The sun blinded me as I opened my eyes in the open air”? But of course, that was an unfair line of thinking. If your truth was waking up in a room with blinds and sunlight slanting through them, isn’t that valid? Isn’t that worth writing about, even though not everyone experiences it?

It was too much to handle. Arthur needed coffee, more weed, and to prepare his kids’ lunches for school.