somewritingexercises

[somewritingexercises]

18th

Re-husked for so long, only recently re-realizing it. Ever the cycle. Wrote the following tonight as an exercise. Method: I read the first sentence of this story - https://books.google.com/books?id=ZjPHRHuQeG8C&pg=PA69#v=onepage - and tried to write something with qualities in common, then I kept going. *

When the hail stopped and the rain eased Jeff stepped out onto the front porch. The air felt heavy with humidity but much cooler than in the house. Jeff breathed deep, enjoying the cooling in his nostrils, throat, lungs. Mild storms can leave a body restless, cooped up and crowded, without the worry of a big storm for a distraction. Water ran fast down the side of the street, the gutter full and in parts sloshing up into the grass verge between street and sidewalk. The rain sewer grate at the intersection at the end of the block, just one house down, must have been partially blocked or maybe the opening was just too small for the amount of rain, because a small but growing lake spread from the grate outward. A white froth bubbled where the water fell, the sound choppy and thick, not a tinkle or patter but more like a long splash - like knocking over a full glass of milk on the table - except the splash never ended, just a chunking pouring sound. A white triangle, it looked like paper maybe?, floated down the gutter, spotted with mud and graying as the paper waterlogged, but it stayed dry enough to remain afloat. “A boat!” Jeff laughed, noticed the sound was a little hoarse. Had he spoken at all today? The boat bobbled along, bumping into sticks and leaves, collecting more splotches and sinking lower but never going under, until it came to the grate. Without thinking Jeff clasped his hands in front of his chest and squinted in anticipation of seeing the boat’s last moment, crashing down a tiny Niagara Falls. Just before the miniature whitewater the boat hung up on something just below the surface, a broken hunk of asphalt or hunk of tree limb, and stuck there, fluttering like a fish on a hook and slowly sinking down. “Aww no,” Jeff muttered, frowning. He briefly considered grabbing a stick and walking over to free the little boat but what was the use? It was already so wet the paper would probably just break apart, and flipping an already breaking up paper boat down a drain wasn’t at all the same as seeing it carried by sheer force of natural events down into the sewer. The rain picked up and anyway the air had begun to feel less cool as the humidity settled around him like a sweater. Jeff breathed deep again, through his nose, slow inward and percussively out, frowned again, turned and went back inside.

[somewritingexercises]

17th Husk state unabated but let me try this. Japanese beetles have found our garden. They eat my and my wife’s favorite flowers - two kinds, hers and mine - and this aggression I can’t let stand. I carry a small bucked of soapy water and a thin stick. I scoop or knock them from flowers and leaves, catching them in the water, where they die, I hope quickly and painlessly. I feel good about improving or sustaining my garden in this way and I feel bad for harming the bugs. I kill them but don’t think it’s right to do so. It’s just a wrong I can live with. [Butterfly meme: is this... the banality of evil?] Killing them I think of the term ‘invasive species’ and how when my most nature-excited child talks about invasive species it can sound vaguely racist: you should go back to where you came from, you don’t belong here, this is OURS. I wonder if those tropes (are they tropes? Is that the word?) are a training in these modes of thought or if I’m overthinking. I try to argue for the invasive species, they just need food and a place to be like everyone else, I say. Yet I kill the beetles, perhaps teaching my child hypocrisy or the uselessness of sympathy? 

[somewritingexercises]

16th

Am I a husk again? Unsure. Definitely not fully husked but definitely not fully unhusked. I’m tired of the pandemic and pandemic life. I hasten to add that I’m not the main victim, I don’t know why I feel the need to leap in with that, guilt over others facing so much worse I suppose, but important to not invalidate my own distress either. Anyway. Writing prompt is to write about a deja vu experience. I thought I didn’t have one but I remembered I do.

Every fall when I start back to teaching I see seniors around campus who graduated the previous spring, and sometimes the spring before that, and I always take a long time to realize that I’m not actually seeing them, they’re mental mirages, visual echoes of past relationships in that place, projected on the blank faces of strangers. It happens so often, every year I think.

Memory oddness - amid the pandemic nightmare I walk into a room, forget why I walked in the room, and I get lost in a foggy mental pause. Speaking on which I can’t keep my eyes open any longer, too late and I am too tired so I’ll call this for now.

16th continues, deja vu experience - I don’t have any other but I have for years, though far less often these last few years, periodically had the experience where something happening now feels like a memory and I think I dreamed it. I looked this up once and I think it had a name and the explanation was that it was some sort of brain error of treating something experienced now as a memory, internal filing error basically. When it used to happen I would often have a short internal memory of my next action and the acts that followed from there and would wonder if I did the thing I “remembered” doing would lead to the rest of what I “remembered” and so I would never do the thing I “remembered” doing because I didn’t want it to be real.

What else. Rain tonight. Hotter day today than expected. Weather-wise I mean, not in terms of my attractiveness. Ha. Hmm.

My mother recently mailed me my college diploma. What a strange artifact, hard to care much but hard to completely stop caring entirely and so throw it away. I wonder if a similar headspace is why my mom sent it to me! Though knowing her she may well be sentimental about it and sentimentally want me to have it. Unclear which.

Hating all of what I’ve typed. Not hating. Disliking. Not disliking so much as not actively liking it, wishing to do so, wanting to write something I like, wanting to write better, treating those last two as synonyms when they are at most only partly related. I think some of this is just situational - mood, accumulated exhaustion - and some of it’s authorial and readerly in that I’ve been writing for a while for the sake of analyzing things and reading similarly, I’ve not written anything for the craft and read in the same spirit for a hot minute. If the dissatisfaction I’m feeling artistically (narcissistically?) has any worthwhile takeaway point it’s that I should read and write more in a craft way, in a way for its own sake rather than instrumentally. Alright, message to self received! Stop your messing around, time you straighten right out.

As I’ve said before I crave a state of paying attention, a flow state I think really, and simultaneously crave the cessation of self-awareness and restlessness - a reduction in excess attention (turned attention of the wrong type). It’s hard in context though because I am both restless and tired, and those pull in different directions, very easy to satisfy one (to some extent I mean, more like soothe one) but doing so comes at the expense of worsening the other.

I typed most of that last paragraph and a spider came running out at me, I’d call it a large small spider - as large as can be while still small, so to speak - and pale. Headed straight toward me. No thought at all, all reflex, I smashed it with my hand. I feel bad for it and don’t celebrate this action. Immediately after I felt so alert, small rush of adrenaline or whatever the brain chemicals are. If that focused alertness could be bottled...!

In any case, restless and tired. I suppose this means the route back to satisfaction will take a bit and perhaps be circuitous, or will involve a lot of annoyance as I can’t prioritize incompatible needs in a way that satisfies them both at the same time, so it has to be a process over time.

Too abstract, too in my own head, needs a new writing prompt.

Alright, prompt is a time someone gave you advice.

In high school I got a job at a fast food place. My girlfriend at the time worked at a different place owned by the same owners, in my mind she helped me get the job but I don’t remember now. I know we worked at the same store one night, maybe two, and made out in the back. I now wonder how good of a boyfriend I was, I sometimes think I was feral much of my life. A lot of people are. I think men especially, though I’m not sure. Anyway, advice.

Once in a while I worked with an older guy who I recall being named Mike though this is over 25 years ago now and at the moment it’s late and I’m tired. In my memory Mike is an older guy, though I’d bet he was 20, 24, an age I’d now sometimes catch myself, unfairly, referring to as “a kid.” Mike came in with a Lollapalooza shirt on one day then put on his uniform - did that happen or am I making it up? I honestly can’t tell; I know we talked about Lollapalooza for sure - and he had gone the year Ministry played (so tempted to google what year; stay in the chair!) and at the time I was very into Ministry up through Psalm 69, loved that guitar sound - still do! - though I was also getting to be too punk to admit to liking things beyond punk. So silly. My point is Mike was cool and I got animated, loved talking with him about music because I loved music, especially live music, and I could tell he did too, and at some point he mentioned going to see Janet Jackson or some other woman popstar and I was dismissive and he said “Nate, just enjoy things!” and then added something like “if it sounds good to someone and they like it, that’s all that matters, if you like something just like it, and focus on liking things, who cares beyond that?” I now - literally just now as I type this - think Mike was expressing a version of I would now think of as poptimism and expressing exasperation with my rockism.

I don’t recall where I heard or read those terms and I’m not 100% sure I’m using them in a non-idiosyncratic way (I live so much of my life worrying about being inadvertently idiosyncratic!). At this point I am far less rockist, in the sense of worried about authenticity and so on, but I do care a great deal about underground/DIY music, music by people with day jobs, played and circulated at a far smaller scale than big pop acts (and for that matter, rock acts). But people should like what they like.

I don’t know that I took Mike’s advice to heart much but I think I did think he had a point at a minimum of not being negative about other people’s excitement, which is a good point to steer by generally speaking.

Probably a more interesting direction would be to write about making out in the back of the fast food joint - I guess I still don’t like what I’m writing! but I did get momentarily into a flow state here and there while typing that, mission accomplished! - but I’m too old for it to be okay writing about the sexual lives of teenagers, even if I happened to be one of those teenagers. Anyway I did the prompt, that’s all this is!

Other thoughts shaken loose by this:

- a young woman co-worker sneezing while taking a customer’s order, saying “oh excuse me!” then adding “it’s flu season!” in a chipper voice

- a young man co-worker talking constantly, almost literally constantly, about sex, describing walking in on his aunt and uncle mid-intercourse while at a holiday resort, some conversation where he talked about how terrible semen must taste and the “it’s flu season!” co-worker interjecting that it tasted like salt water

- a customer who worked nights at a factory nearby who would come in and chat with us while we made his order, I place him around Mike’s age, the general category of older but cool and retroactively a kid; I later move away to college and am told by my then-girlfriend that this guy went to prison for killing someone at an ATM in the process of robbing them

- another young man co-worker, physically small and very funny, occasionally interacting with his sister by phone, and her coming in to the place once, always very acidly and full of profanity, each telling the other “eat a dick!” in a tone of contempt

- driving home at night after work, do I remember this or am I just drawing on a wealth of night time driving memories? I can’t tell. It’s hard to pinpoint very many in particular but it was such a very common occurrence in my life. Weighing against the idea that I remember driving home specifically from this job is that I’m not entirely sure what car I drove. Did I have three cars before we had children? I think so. Two of them before graduating college. One night I do remember driving home: come over a hill, rural road, going fast - the speed limit, but fast - and two raccoons were in the road, no time for any of us to react, ran over both of them, loud thump and crunch sounds. Horrible. Another night, this time my mom in the car too: a deer leaping out and me getting lucky, it colliding with the side of the car and in a glancing way I think, trying to turn, not really damaging the car, then the headlights of the car behind us flashing I think because the deer had stepped into the road and hit the deer, its body blocking the lights for a moment causing the flash effect, that car pulling over behind us. Another night: a broken strut on a front wheel of my car, my dad driving out to fix it enough at the road side to let me drive home. How did I call him? Pay phone, I assume, this was pre-cell phone. Another night: a high school friend driving me home - or driving us both to his house? I don’t remember - after play practice, and he zoning out - falling asleep at the wheel? - and as we came up to an intersection I said “red light” tentatively” then “Red Light! RED LIGHT!” and he only heard me after I shouted, then, alert, stopped in time and safely enough. We laughed about it after. I wouldn’t now, if I were the driver anyway, and the thought of young people doing so now, considered from my own middle aged position, is worrying.

Enough now, just an exercise after all.

Looking at Scrivener, the two Scrivener Projects I write in have between them a total of 929,000 words. That includes to-do lists and whining in a journal, and doesn’t include some things I wrote and lost or never bothered to keep copies of etc. (I wrote on the bus to work years back, trying to have ideas, trying to get out of writers block; that bus writing, for instance, is gone as well.) A million words is a fair estimate. Proud of that in a sort of ‘I spent a lot of time’ kind of way. I think my rate of committing words to the electronic page has declined but I type and think faster now as well. Less life-time for art and intellect, better use of that time when I do take the time. Strikes and gutters. We play the hand we’re dealt, to mix the metaphor. (Someone should invent a bowling-themed card game so the mixed metaphor becomes unmixed! I deserve this!) I wonder if eight years from now I’ll be at 2 million. I like the thought, just keep going. Quantity is job number one. Quality is an emergent property of time spent. That said, I likely could spend my time more thoughtfully as well.

But enough enough, just an exercise!

[somewritingexercises]

15th. Re-husked, attempting un-re-husking, however temporary.

Craving things hard to name I googled “writing exercise,” found “write a letter to your younger self,” considered it a moment then thought what would I say - “there’s a global pandemic killed millions, it’s been two years now” as if seeing it coming could make some difference. I understand people wanting to be free from the pandemic, so-called return to normal -  who doesn’t want this nightmare to end? - but the idea of ignoring this unfolding catastrophe just doesn’t fit into my mind. It’s a kind of non-thought that shuts my mind off momentarily, like “imagine an object black and white in all the same places at the same times,” not an imagination but a pause in cognitive function. Is it like something to be a covid minimizer? Maybe it’s precisely like not being anything - “don’t worry, it’s just like going to sleep.” The peace sounds nice. I hate the deaths and harms most of course, but lower on the list yet still for being on the list upsetting, I hate the black hole quality of the pandemic, sucking in my whole life and mind, leaving so little else. It’s hard to think or do anything else, so much energy taken by staring in horror. I’ll send this to my younger self, shall I?

Had I to do it over again I’d live my life the same way really, any changes minimal. I like how my life has turned out relative to the hand I was dealt, and I am happy, certainly happy enough - though there is something grotesque stressing one’s own happiness in an avalanche of death, disablement, suffering. Among the minimal changes I would make is less time on bullshit and more time and money on art and activities and gear that facilitate art.

That’s part of the craving, more time and energy for something creative. So far I’m not feeling like I’ve struck gold, as it were, but better to type than not.

Send that to my younger self - keep going, write even when you don’t feel like it, write more when you do feel like it, it won’t get much easier but you’ll get better at it. The resulting pride will feel nice and the products and their reception won’t feel nice enough to justify the time you put in - this is an investment with a poor return literally and in terms of the gratification the product provides - but your impulse to find the time its own reward is correct. You’ll forget that sometimes. If you develop a habit of keeping going even when you don’t think you can, don’t know why you should, it will carry you through those forgetting times. You will sometimes find music - specific songs yes of course but music in general, all songs - a solace and a practice of this skill, a lived commitment and practice of keeping going, from which much else follows, something to do and to live out rather than something to be talked into. Here too trust that impulse that music matters and the ways of life lived in relation to music do as well, this will help you cultivate treating the time as its own reward and soothe you when you don’t great the time so.

And when your hair goes gray at the temples it’ll look good.

[somewritingexercises]

14th Husk state unabated, but newly unpleasant. If I could dry out so completely as to forget I wanted to be otherwise that might be alright, a relief really, from these echoing aspirations who cloud round at night, dimming what I have and do and am. I suppose we don’t entirely choose what to want or who to be, so much as we show up in a self already populated by impulses and needs and then set about embracing, renovating, or loathing that self. Hell of a way to live. The barrel of crude disgust I carry for the official decision-makers has gotten too heavy. My back hurts, my heart. Some nights I cry while washing the dishes, the feelings just boil over. I thought I’d try to write something, to both feed and alleviate those aspirations, to water those impulses and so hope to de-huskify. I think the reality is that to really do this I need to do more than just type once in a while. I have to re-prioritize which means re-organize, and includes reading more as well. Nothing ever easy. At this point though it’s late and I can’t keep my eyes open so enough for now. 

[somewritingexercises]

13th. Husk-state continues but I am back to trying 100 words a day. As I come around with the stick and the bucket of soapy water the japanese beetles stick their back pair of legs out, I assume in preparation for an escape flight, but maybe it’s a rude gesture, or the beetles relaxing their grip so the knock by the stick hurts less. They land in the cottony white suds, usually on their backs, limbs splayed, and float. It’d look peaceful if I didn’t know better. I prefer the splayers and the illusion of peace. Sometimes one clings to the stick and to life and I feel less placid in killing them.

[somewritingexercises]

12

Twelfth post nearly six weeks after the eleventh. Circumstances wore me out, sucked me dry. I am going to try to try again, and also to not waste energy on how my trying falls short: more is more. In any case, tonight’s effort. Journal entry 6-8-21

I just need to get my fingers moving, I tell myself, so here goes. I was sat in the chair thinking about my dead aunt, about another aunt post a photo of her on facebook, about my parents and others aunts and uncles all being old now but younger than a lot of my friends’ parents and aunts and uncles, about my skewed sense of age and its family origin (had I lived in line with the pattern in my parents generation, and had children who similarly followed suit, I would be a grandfather now, and you know, I’m not sure that was a bad decision on their part despite its costs), about all these fucking mosquito bites, about my young neighbor who came across the street and talked to us out in the yard tonight and hung out until the mosquitos got too bad (she wants kids, I can tell, I’m not sure if her partner does, at least not at the same pace), about gardening, about playing Ninja Warrior in the backyard and the three year old breaking down crying at the end in frustration over her inability to convey what she wanted and so get her own way. Any of these could be a starting point. It doesn’t matter what the start is or what the product is (my mind leaps into Tom Petty singing “Keep A Little Soul”), it’s just about getting into motion in some way. I think I am pent up, an excess of concern over starting points, and tapped out by life though the reality is I’ve rarely done anything creative from a position of well restedness and a feeling of time to spare. I have had and still have a good life but it’s a demanding one and the myth of perfect set up is just that, a myth, so it’s really about returning to habits I suppose. Reading more as well.

*

Writing prompt: What is a mirror, what are all the mirrors in my home, real or metaphorical? What is a window, what are all the windows in my home, real or metaphorical?

A mirror is a sheet of glass coated to opacity, light bounces back off of it creating a semblance of knowledge of the person looking at it while the object itself disappears behind the reflection of the looker. What else in my life do I treat as an object that lets me see myself and so disappears behind my own image? What *don’t* I treat in this way might be the shorter list. I suppose a great deal of what I own is in fact a kind of mirror and costume set. These books, that guitar, the rock climbing gear, the toolbox, all ways of dressing so as to give myself a certain image of myself.

A window is a sheet of class that you look through to see what’s outside and apart from you and it lets you see what’s apart while still keeping it apart, and like the mirror, the point of the object is really to display something other than itself, no need to look at the object itself - the mirror and the window - because it’s just a vehicle to facilitate looking elsewhere. What’s in my house that I never look at, only look through? What do I use to look at something else and also use to keep that something else farther away and confined?

I write to see the world anew, as if looking through a telescope, to peer at it closely but without actually getting close, remaining safely at a distance. I write to frame the world under glass, keeping it far from me, walled off, feeling it only vicariously and never viscerally. I write to see myself as serious, a thinker, a striver; to see myself as inadequate (“he can’t write so much as type”), an old craving from a hard childhood. I don’t admit this often but I do crave that invalidation because it feels familiar. Is this true? I’m unsure. I write to see myself in costume, trying out different hats and scarves and what it might be like to be that reflection. I write to see myself in the future, imagining a me for whom what I struggle with today has become effortless due to accumulated muscle memory. I write to look past the crack in my heart from which ennui bubbles up - was it all worth it? why have I wasted so much time? have I any time left? - and to see the sparkling quartz flecking the heart, small glimmers that are worth and so redeem these choices: I write because I value the commitment to writing as lived reality, I suppose, itself a phrase which I hope shows who as I truly am and which is also arrogant and I hope is a convincing costume.

I now struggle to keep my eyes open so I call this enough.

[somewritingexercises]

12 Warner’s book opens by asking the reader to write down instructions for how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich so here goes. Take two pieces of bread. Put them on a plate. Slather one side of one slice of bread with peanut butter. How much? That’s up to you. I like to spread it on thin while still being sure to coat the entire side of the slice. If you picked up the bread, set the piece of bread back on the plate - wait! Make sure you put it peanut butter side up! Alright, now spread jelly on one side of the other slice. Jam, preserves, and similar spreads are acceptable as well. Use whatever spread, and of whatever flavor, you have on hand and that the sandwich’s intended recipient prefers. Personally, I prefer strawberry jam. Anyway, spread the jelly or whatever onto one side of the other piece of bread - the unpeanutbuttered side. As with the peanut butter, use the amount that makes sense to you. Myself, I like almost as much jelly as peanut butter, which one of my children says is too much jelly. Put on what constitutes an enjoyable amount as judged by the person who will eat the sandwich. If you’re making it for someone else but aren’t sure how much jelly they like, put on the amount you like for yourself. After spreading the jelly on the bread place the jellied piece on top of the other piece so that the jelly and peanut butter both face inward  - so the jelly touches the peanut butter and the exposed sides of the sandwich are neither jellied nor peanut buttered, to any appreciable degree anyway. There you have it.

[somewritingexercises]

11th

Young people riot, old people watch. I overstate polemically to identify a continuum: groups gathering and fighting outside existing institutional frameworks, and individuals despairing in houses that institutionalize isolation. Specialists address both the active young and the restive old, condescending saviors who slither out from the mud of official politics - parties, NGOs, universities and think tanks. They wear masks of mock selflessness, nod gravely to simulate listening, mouth platitudes, but what they really do is far humble. They hold only bottles of glue - don’t be fooled by the differences in packaging - from which they dab small, tacky globs onto the stuff of the world as it frays, chips, cracks. They begin, maybe, hoping to “make a difference” but they will only ever - they are paid only to - stick the world in place, prevents its from breaking down to the point where we can begin to consider real freedom. Only the rioting youth and their analogs have any chance of actually constructing freedom. I wrote this in response to an exercise I found. Its point was to take a text and identify the subjects and verbs. I decided to then try to write some lines loosely in the spirit of the text (it was a text by Mark Fisher - his post of April 11, 2006, on what he called “reflexive impotence”) paying attention to the placement of my subjects and verbs. I might repeat this exercise a few times to see if there’s any benefit to doing so.

[somewritingexercises]

10th

A quiet life is its own reward but spend too long nodding because the social cue said to and you can forget how to improvise - the enforced script becomes your internal monologue and when you try to remember what it was like before, when you had your own thoughts, you hear just a clatter of radio jingles and contentless affirmations, “oh, hmm, that’s nice.” Other people reflect us to ourselves and if they never look at you - after all, the point of nodding along is to be comfortably overlooked - you forget what you look like, who you are, a candle just after it’s gone out, a dissipating wisp of smoke trying to hold a last memory of light, heat.

Wrote that riffing on a line by Edward Hoagland: “Sarcasm and skepticism have a price, and our minds become claustrophobic if we can’t rally pals with whom to sneer at the follies of authority.”

[trait][trait][effect - judgment][detail of effect][opposite of traits - action, trait of object]

*

Now to push words out without using you know what. A hard part of doing this is that my mind turns blank in that I focus only on my formal limit of just using 25 symbols and not that symbol I’m avoiding, and I find I got nothing to actually say!

My days look to stay full of crap this month, I think, cuz my work’s snowballing and my will’s collapsing. I am so sick of this bullshit. I want things to turn amazing, I want to my oomph back. I will say, I’m proud that I try anyway.

I’m playing FACS right now, art rock I want to call punk as a kind tipping with words - good going, young folks, I call you punk as tip of my hat! I think of Drahla, also arty and cold and punk in an honorific at a minimum.

My brain’s awash with fog, just want to drift off, stop trying, float off into that dark. Not too long now, watching that clock tick down - soon I’ll turn to washing up, must stay conscious until I stand again, find music to aid this.

Alright that’s ten minutes. This was hard! * While I would wish drowning on nobody, my heart hurts more for the drowning nobodies in steerage than those officers who, as the ship began to list to starboard, avoided eye contact with one another and stepped closer to the captain, hoping the man who did not know to steer around the iceberg might yet find the fastest route to the lifeboats. As I think on their selfish thoughtlessness I dwell in my anger, ignoring as best I can the water rising at my own feet. 

[somewritingexercises]

9th

A)

Years ago when more fragile I perched up on a high stone fence, a wall dividing two pieces of property really. I rested there only an instant really but because I’ve gone back over it in my head so many times, looking at it from every angle, so to speak, and I think because what happened next proved so momentous, that in my memory my time astride that wall lasted hours. I can still see the buttery yellow sun light, the shadows of the trees’ leaves stippling the grass, hear the whispering rustle of the wind setting all the foliage to vibrate. That whispered chorus sang to me on fall, Lucifer-like you might say, from on high down to a thud and crack as the earth punch me across my middle. I shut my eyes but not before I saw the cracks spiderweb my shell, a queasy glimpse of my yolk leaking, the knights turning away unable to bear the sight of my injuries. I was never the same again, despite so many men and horses attempting the labors of reassembly. I left my old self behind entirely that day and, with time, embraced the new self I have become, though I do still return to that moment and its place in the forking river of my life between then and now. I do so not to lament directions not taken, but rather to shed light on the routes I have in fact taken: how much of where - and who - I ended up was due to that day on the wall, and how much is a matter of my own choice, my own inborn self you might say? There is, I think, no way of knowing. This has led to me to be more accepting of the broken and the breaking when I encounter them in dive bars and diners. What falls from what heights broke what parts of them, leaving them desperately hungry to tell a stranger about their daughter who doesn’t speak to them, about their failed marriage, their addiction to gambling? I just listen, knowing that in letting them speak a moment in their store of grief I am giving them something they need, and in the momentary connection I feel more in and of the world than at any other time in my life, including in my whole shelled pre-fall days. And so I say I am at peace with my defects and it has made me at peace with others’ as well. B)

Alright look yes I fell completely apart. Okay? That’s what you media jackals want to hear. You want to hear me say it myself, you like to hear a guy being all down and cracking up so I’ll just say it, get it over with: I fell completely apart. You happy now? You know what, you people make me sick. You pussyfoot around this, you never come out directly and ask but you’re clearly salivating like dogs imagining a bone, and the thing is, I’ve always said it, I’ve never denied it, so this whole song and dance is a ritual you play to get your appetite up. And you know what else, you people act like you want the truth and the full story but you never ask about the real reality of it - why was I on that wall in the first place? Why did I end up tumbling off of it? What did it feel like to be at the feet, the hooves I guess, of a bunch soldiers and horses, looking at their stupid long faces all grave and sick and knowing it was me that made them sick. You think you want the full story because you have this fantasy about being a voyeur looking at someone else’s suffering but you don’t want to know what it’s really like, you’re cowards living in your own imagined reality pretending you want the real world. The truth is, I knew right away that nothing would be same again, I saw it in the faces of the King’s men, in their disgust. Even amid all the pain and fear I could feel above all that they looked at me in horror and every time, every single time, that I have looked in the mirror since then when I look at myself I see the disgust in their faces and I feel it myself when I look at my reflection and I think “they were right” and I know that nothing and nobody will ever put me back together again. So go print that in your stupid little magazine. Call it “H. Dumpty Breaks Silence” or some bullshit, make loads of money off something you’ll never understand. I don’t care one ounce about your magazine or your opinions. But I hope you look in the mirror and see yourselves with that same disgust because that’s what you deserve.

[somewritingexercises]

8th

It’s almost two a.m. and I thought I’d do a bit of work at my writing. I don’t know why. A strong instinct to put in hours that might pay off, I think, as distinct from so many hours burnt without any point. Work took far too many hours today, and not just today. I’m a husk, dry and hollow from all that work. I had fun talking with a class about my book today, that was good. I was glad to know that my book is good think with. I want to just pass out right now, so much work to not do so, and to still do this typing, holy moly. Today had an air of spring finally, that was good, with luck it will stay that way. I should start to work out more again. I could do that outdoors, taking in the air and sun.

Alright that’s ten minutes. I could barely keep my eyes open for that.

And now: “Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on.”

Some people go along with the world too much and others go along too little and both lead to acting out. I used to care a great deal about getting the sources of people’s foibles right. These days as I dog paddle against wave after crushing wave of exhaustion and stress, I find that the origins matter less than the behavior itself. This is in part the result of my own growing impatience - just get out of my way, I don’t care why you’re in my way in first place. I worry it is also a loss of empathy, but whether as cause or effect I am unsure. Is empathy a mental and emotional practice which precedes and informs action in the world? Or is empathy the internal echo of living a life virtuously compatible with others? Maybe a little of both. I care less about the origins and am focused more on retaining the quality, as I have begun to notice what I think are hints of possibility of becoming a different person, and not one that I like better. My theory is we become who we are through a series of small dings - hammering metal into shape involves thumping it many, any times - with short, fast shaping moments being far more rare. To put it another way, a stream or river is defined by its banks and as it flows it washes at those banks, reshaping them and so, as a result, itself. We meander morally through our lives, becoming people we never anticipated and can not recognize - and who can not recognize our priort selves. Enough for now.

[somewritingexercises]

7th

Again with this training activity hoping to wind up writing at a

That string of words couldn’t finish without violating my fram

That couldn’t too.

This is so hard!

My goal is making my writing b

Again! Fuck!

Must start from scratch.

I sit again typing with an aim of my writing quality rising. (Torturous, both how that sounds and doing this!)

Can’t go on, must go on, I’ll go on - I think that’s from a famous playwright. Good words to stand upon, to stay in motion, I think.

Honing a craft is in part putting hours. That’s what I’m doing now. Logging a bit of typing analogous to lifting or running. Also what I’m doing is adding in an additional difficulty so my brain must do additional work, hoping that pays off in a way. It’s taxing, anyway. I could do this six months (but could I...? I don’t know if I could, it sucks so much!) and that’s how I’ll know if it actually paid off. No shortcuts. Too bad!

That’s enough of that for today. That was really challenging. I’m going to do a Gatsby line in a moment. Is this any use? Are there other better things to do instead, or in addition? As ever I’m unsure. Keep going, just keep going. I should spend just a little time finding other exercises for the sake of the variation but I should also just commit to spending a large period of time on this as results come from large inputs of time really. Anyway, let me find Gatsby.

"the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they ex- press them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.”

I wasn’t in bands for long and we didn’t play out much but when we did some of the best parts were the long drives. We had our upcoming show to look forward to or our recent show to recount, giving the social space inside the car a warm glow of shared purpose and a readymade set of references, small fragments of a script from which to improvise to keep moving together. We could stay in a chattering flow state similar to the better flow state of playing music. Being punks, we thought of ourselves as forging real connections through our refusal to wear the masks and go through the motions of society’s bullshit. Years later, embittered by how it all, and my years since, worked out - or didn’t - I looked back cynical about and impatient with younger us. We didn’t break from anything, just used different cliches from the standard ones, or used standard ones without realizing it - unwittingly stealing phrases we didn’t remember overhearing - and our connections were more transient and less honest than we thought: we still wore costumes, postured, preened, wanted to be looked at in specific ways rather than, as we pretended, just being ourselves. Years later still, (just) a little more at peace and (a lot) more resigned to my lot in life, I see younger us with more empathy and in greater context. Everyone speaks in borrowed phrases. We all see ourselves in mirrors built by - wearing clothes stitched by, selected with tastes shaped by - other people, and that’s fine. We were just getting used to our own capacity for self-making being (barely) ours, having been handed the keys to a limited extent in late adolescence. My empathy extends to the bitter older but now still younger me who rolled his eyes at our younger more punk selves. That me was trapped, frightened. I still am, but less loudly, maybe, or more numb, maybe. It seems to me self-making is significantly retroactive, a fashioning of a story from out past stories, and inflecting those stories by new juxtapositions and adding frame stories. This is the thought of an older person, a person whose Now is saturated with Then in a conscious way, while the younger person’s thought - I assert for effect - is a Now empty of Then partly through simply not having lived as long and so having few memories (I say this, though my Now has for as long as I can remember been easily crowded in by bad memories, if anything less so in my Now now than in my Now then), partly through force of will, and maybe partly though a greater skill or ability at shutting off, tuning in, locking out the noise and entering another kind of flow state, a presentness without self-awareness. Maybe I’m making that all up, I’m unsure. I think another part of it is in the social context, the setting of having others who support that past-less present and production of flow. I’m tempted to speculate on the truth and being of either - is there REALLY a present that is or isn’t saturated with the past? is the past REALLY still here? - but what’s the use. In any case we play the hand we’re dealt and that includes playing the game as well to some extent, whatever modifications and cheating and chivalrous dealings with other players we may be able to pull off on the way, and while the house has always won so far and while the game should abolished... well, again what’s the use? These lines lead astray, “they look the same - askance (excuse my failing sense of humor).” Is there a non-arbitrary stopping point for this, remembering it is after all just an exercise? Can I go meta, or transition out through rhetorical questions? Cheap, that, I think. Fine fine, call it a day, count these words as time in the chair, accumulating the hours that produce, I hope, greater skill over time. Can I loop it back to the beginning, tie the end in a bow with those car-ride conversations? Those were in a context of shared pursuit of all at once self-expression, self-discovery, connection with others, and improvement of artistic craft and output. All of that remains today, two Nows that rhyme I suppose, though less communal and less available in big chunks of time than back then, and I am happy to be in correspondence again with some of those old friends, themselves also working to keep a creative life. I don’t know if we’ll ever be on long car trips together again, I’m glad we once were and our connections were real even if they happened within known genres and tropes rather than being of our own making. I suppose I believe both that everyone is of their own making and no one is of their own making. I suppose as well that Marx said this better. When do the present and past add up and when are they subtracted? Who writes those problems we keep having to practice? Stop, stop.

[somewritingexercises]

6th

My training habit split apart amid work and all. Too much to do plus a lack of will and snoozing. I am not loving how odd my phrasing sounds from avoiding typing that symbol but it could wind up that having to think about my words will build up my writing brain. I’ll find out... As I sit on our couch, to my right is my kids nocturnal books-and-snuggling ritual. A pain throbs in my torso, my body aching from so long quarantining, worrying. I play a bit of my music, from last night’s insomniac noodling. Sounds okay in my book, not amazing but kinda good anyway. Our big cat jumps up, wants into my lap, looks quizzical as if to say “what you doing old man?” Jumping off from this bit of Fitzgerald, trying to rewrite it: “I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.“An old writing teacher used to tell me to let my writing and so my mind do more meandering. “Don’t conclude until you know you’re really finished,” he’d say. He said it repeatedly because it never sank in to my writing, I think because my brain filed it instead under life advice. As a result I’ve made friends with several lovable-but-at-first-prickly weirdos and heard many a crank expound their conspiracy theories, utopian plans, and petty resentments. 

[somewritingexercises]

5th

Gray day out my window. Sky frowns with clouds, an angry talking-to in too much proximity, puffs of air and spit landing on you. Oak limbs shaking from wind. Chilly too. I stood on our porch to look for spring shoots - saw a handful, that was good - and got cold. Off to my right two cats grappling, big and afraid against small and curious. Big springs up, walks away, stops to cough, six coughs, worrying. Our cats aging is a thing I look away from. My aging too, mostly. Clocks wind down.

Wrote the above continuing to avoid the letter E for the sake of the exercise. Now going to riff on a Gatsby line.

I grew a shell. Minerals I sweated out formed a crust covering my flinching skin. No one and nothing touches me now, only my carapace. Beneath it I remain all raw nerves, blisters, old wounds. In a famous scene from the tv show the Simpsons the evil tycoon Montgomery Burns goes to a doctor and is found to have everything, his blood a highway with literally all diseases present. The superabundance of microbes protects him as it forms a traffic jam preventing each illness from doing anything. Sometimes I think my abundance of bad memories works similarly. A chance line triggers one memory that sits in a long line - a web of many lines - with other memories and they all begin to wriggle. Soon there’s too much to pay attention to, each individual bad memory lost in the clamor they all make together and so, without any of them being individually nourished by direct attention, they recede.

[somewritingexercises]

4th

4th

(in two parts. first, more typing without the letter E) Again this work of trying to up my craft as phrasologist, what if this has no point, what if it fails? Do it anyway. Can’t go on, must go on, I’ll go on...! I got books from our local library branch today, good to do that, to chat with a librarian for a bit, and to not stay indoors constantly too. I also had a chat with a pal during my trip, good to catch up, last did so I think four months ago? Six? Brain’s mush right now, too scant supply of anything but work and frustration.

(second, riffing on a line from a novel. Keeping each attempt as I grew the line.)

When the wind hits the house just right it creaks - the force of the air a finger plucking our home like a bass string.

The gust of wind plucks our house like a bass string.

A gust and a creak,  the wind plucks our home like a guitar string,

A gust and a creak, our house turns sonorous, plucked like a guitar string by the wind. With each of the building’s groans I picture something swaying

A gust and a creak, our house turns sonorous, plucked like a guitar string by the wind. With each of the building’s groans I picture a beam swaying inside the wall

A gust and a creak, our house turns sonorous, plucked like a guitar string by the wind. With each of the building’s groans I picture a beam swaying behind the plaster, imagine a crack opening in the wall. The house sounds from its flaws and weaknesses, in my mind. This is a metaphor as well for my memories. The breeze of a chance line in a novel, read off the page for a writing exercise, and a retaining wall in my personality rasps, sounding a bad memory - my dad, shouting, my mom, shouting. This response to the wind is evidence of a broken structure always about to break through the paint hiding it, in my mind. Changing the metaphor I picture out of tune wind chimes playing an ugly chord, bad memory clanging into bad memory into bad memory. That captures the noise and duration of it better, but also better states - makes - the truth of the matter: it’s just noise, nothing is falling apart and the clatter subsides, and these chimes sit on a hook at the corner of this home, not central to its architecture nor a sign of its value, merely left there thoughtlessly by previous owners. Some spring day I’ll get out the ladder and take them down.

(This was riffing on the first line from Gatsby: In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.)

[somewritingexercises]

3rd

Usual drill for a bit, I will find similar drills for this goal but not today. This drill calls my mind to how groups of words form paths that form a path, constrain options, so that in sticking to this limitation again and again I must undo a group of words to build room for words that stick to my plan.

Can I say actual stuff this way? I’ll try. I try. I am trying.

I’m into my book just now, a good study of marxist construction of notions of social imagination. (How torturous to say! What if this limitation is bad for my writing?! I’ll find out…!)

Out my window, across our road, against a gray sky a building has a mound of trash in its lawn - yard’s brown grass sickly from snow and clouds blocking out sun too long. Walking from car to door and back, that building’s inhabitants hunch as if afraid, as if carrying a big bag of rocks. This is all my mind’s condition too.