My friend and former vertical neighbor Alex said that he would definitely read my blog, so this is my attempt to force him to do so.
I’ve been on and off with my writing recently, with posts like the following:
September 14th, – 91 words…
New Haven, CT
After a while the polarity switches. I’m not drawn to the keyboard but repulsed, dissuaded, or otherwise unable to grasp the necessary object: writing. Maybe it’s the gravity of a well travelled path, carved out from the relative infinite of things one could be doing. The magnetism of routine should not be ignored.
So here’s my latest attempt to reroute those neural connections. I sat at a coffee shop before my haircut and just read instead of bringing out my computer and typing. I’m reading a book, Breath, by James Nestor….
Before moving to New Haven, well, before beginning the process of my dance eastward, I had a decent streak of hitting 500, and often 1000, words a day.
Surprisingly, visiting Alaska, catching Covid, staying at a family member’s in Colorado, packing one’s life up in two weeks into a car and taking just over a week to drive across the country, has impacted my routine. I feel a hot jealousy of the Neal Cassady types, those whose lack of routine is ripe fodder for their writing. My whole desire with this has been to understand myself a little bit better, and I now know that it takes concerted effort to get myself to hit some reasonably long strides of writing.
It’s funny to think about how writing and identity are entwined, in an effort to understand myself, I change myself. I wasn’t really a writer, since I didn’t write. But now I do, so I am. And it’s a necessary new vantage point to look upon my past selves. It’s a critical turn, like a splitting mirror, which reminds me of another entry of mine from September 1st,
It’s incredibly hard to try to start writing these without the phrase “I want to kill myself” bubbling up like a dead rat in a grease trap. I know I never actually want to kill myself, and it’s a contemporary coping mechanism, ‘ha ha, if you don’t hire me, I’m gonna kms!’ But I do have to reckon with a depressive history of my family, and it’s difficult to look back on my liquid middle-school hormone riddled brain, which was mainly concerned with imagining what all my friends and family would say when I died accidentally, without seeing a pattern. Studying cognitive development, the unconscious, and the rest of that mental cohort, it’s funny to get stuck behind that mental one way mirror. I know I’m watching myself, but I cannot speak to the other half. And only one of us can even see the other, though we both know we’re looking at the other, and even then only one can verify that. I know you’re in there! I know you’re listening! Ha ha! bang bang on the metallic table.
It’s even worse when we don’t have a job. The cop Foucault talks about was laid off for being not hitting quotas. The, alleged, perp, was picked up for loitering.
I wrote for an audience of one since I began in April. Then for three when I made a commitment to my dear friend Robbie to write 500 words a day, owing the other $1 for each 100 words short or something like that. My assumed audience then was myself (again), Robbie, and an imagined public that I really didn’t reckon with fully.
Now I’m going to try that calculation. Thinking publicly, writing publicly forces my fingers in not too dissimilar patterns, but distinct ones away from a pseudo-private sphere. Even within myself desires are agonistic, the selves themselves create a mini-public. Mainly, I was writing in a way which let me think about personal interactions that I don’t feel yet confident to write about in this format. Now, I’m going to do my best to maintain dignity in the shadow of public shame. That shame is this self which is on display, it withers when brought into words. This doesn’t make much sense. But then again dinner is ready.
Decayed Criticism 