It’s still April. And I’m sitting in the sun and writing. Obviously. And the coffee brings out the “obviously”. Welcome to the room, presumptuousness. Good thing I’m outside, so the presumption disappears into the cloudscape (but probably remains in the atmosphere even after the hummingbird wings mix it into the air). There is a hummingbird hanging out nearby.
I’m wondering about history this morning. I’ve been spending time with my mom lately and we’ve been talking about my dad. My dad died last year. Passed away. Went out of this world. I don’t think I’ve used the word died until now, I’ve obscured it with the metaphorical forms (but is death a metaphor? I don’t think so.). So I’ve been thinking about the connection between now and what happened before, looking at a picture of my mom and dad from when they were dating and seeing a little bit of myself, a little bit of each of them, and a little bit of life before children (but that’s just the guilt of a child talking, considering that I was one of theirs).
The past. Is that what chapters one and two have become? What about paragraphs one and two of this morning’s chapter? You’re probably reading this at night, so it’s tonight’s chapter for you. What do I intend? Do I intend for you, the reader, to be sitting on a front porch in the middle morning sun while you listen to an audio reader read this to you (hopefully not me)? I think intent is over rated. Perhaps criminally over-rated, but I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know when to make words into compound words using dashes (I might have been more comfortable in the German language, in which that word for words that are mashed together is just a reference to the whole language). I remembered the word from the most recent parentheses – portmanteau (this is going to be a nightmare of a thing to edit, to the same degree that this chapter and the ones that are in the past are constantly looking at their own navels). I really don’t remember what a navel is, but I imagine it being near the belly button.
I’ve been thinking about death a lot in the last year, which has lead to thinking about life a lot. I talk a lot of shit about Buddhism, but the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying spoke to me in the early winter (remember, it’s April now) on this point: death is something to make a part of the story of being a person, of being alive, not something to pretend is never going to happen. I may not meditate on it as continuously as the Rinpoches seem to, but I have been working on narrating it into my existence in a loving, active way.
This is the middle of the beginning. That’s what everyone says about chapter threes. Or at least that’s what they will be saying after this book is published to wild acclaim and read in high school English classes (and brutally dissected by hectoring professorial teachers in those English classes, sort of like high school biology classes). And all I can do is keep my fingers crossed that this book never meets a publisher, stays away from editors, and that my WordPress site remains difficult to navigate with a very limited readership, otherwise I will face Tennessee Williams’ curse of success. Which sounds terrible – people doing things for other people that they don’t need and are done for too little money. Not something I’d like, even though I go to coffee shops now already. Hypocrisy, thine shalt be mine middle initials!
The sun is “blinding” while my fingers are quite cold. It’s a bit like being in a hot tub when it’s snowing around you, or being in a steam shower with the cold water on your face (I did the latter yesterday and it cleared out all the ivy league pollen that was creating allergic outcomes and so much snot).
I wonder about paragraph length. What does it say about my state of mine when they are short? When they are unbelievably long? Perhaps it’s related to the way my feet are: when they are stable and planted “firmly” on the ground, the paragraphs are of medium length, they’re a bit longer when I’m on the front of my feet because the sentences flow more quickly, and a bit shorter when I’m on the balls of my feet (when they’re in a braking posture). That’s a hypothesis that I don’t really intend to test and I’m unscientifically moving my feet all over the place while I type this paragraph.
This chapter feels like it might be jerking you around a little, my dear, sweet, somehow still reading reader. What kind of monstrous author casually (was it casual? I hope not.) mentions the death of a parent and then talks about hummingbirds, paragraph lengths, and steam showers? This one. So bail out now. You’ve already probably paid for the book so the publisher doesn’t care if you finish reading (though I would appreciate it), and there isn’t even any publisher when this is being written, so no cut of royalties to be lost by anyone. And I think it would be a terrible thing to become wealthy, so if you decide to bail out now and find someone who was about to buy this book, just give it to them. And don’t pay me or the publisher when you do it. Unless you’re listening to the audio book and stuck in one of those licensing hellscapes where you would have to give the person who wants to read this book your Amazon password in order to share the book with them. That is far more intimate than sharing your pornographic browsing history (since there’s somehow more variation in what’s on Amazon these days than on the largest corner of the internet).
Morally speaking, I’m not sure how writing works out “in the end”. We talk about in the end (and make sure you get the different inflections between the quoted and the italicized, please – it’s a bit like Mandarin vs. Cantonese) and we don’t exactly mean death. We sort of mean at the stage of life when there is a living reckoning, when you have the space to gather the projects and the relational account books together, along with your team of philosopher-accountants (and theocraccountants if you’re a religious type) and you come up with your account balance. Some believe that the assets and the liabilities always add up to the shareholders’ equity (if you don’t know what those things are, please read an intro to finance book or watch some Youtube videos – they’re not morally good things to know, but when an ownership society has a language, those who want to be empowered within that society should learn the basics of the language until the language can be modified – maybe. I don’t really know anything about morality.). I’m not sure how you feel about full sentences in parentheses, but it seems like it will be easier for an audio book reader (probably me) if they’re in parentheses rather than in footnotes. And maybe this will only live on audio or on the Internet. But probably not, who doesn’t want to have a copy of one’s work in the Library of Congress and at the local bookstore in rural Wisconsin that you just biked to?
I can’t remember if I’ve talked about bicycles much yet, but that’s the beautiful thing about writing a book-length work. You get to forget what you wrote earlier and trust that the reader has a better memory than you and is actually making connections that you might not have even made between the things you forgot and the things you’re currently remembering to write. Bicycles though. I really spend a lot of time on them. “Really” because I’m trying to make the point that it’s perhaps unusual how much time. 2020 me spend so much time on a bicycle that my left and right legs weigh more than the bicycle (that’s an exaggeration, my bicycle is very heavy). I’ve taken an approach in “designing” a bicycle that is a car replacement (I say designing in quotes because I come up with ideas and my friendly neighborhood bike shop makes them happen on my behalf. They’re wonderful.). So many full sentences in parentheses, it feels so good.
Need to take a break here, it’s been a high coffee morning. But I won’t be long, coffee helps the medicine come out, as they say. Be right back. These sorts of pieces of information are like plot, right? So you feel like you’re moving through the story? Isaiah Berlin seems to think that’s important for identifying me as a hedgehog or a fox. Anyway, I think both shit in the woods, so please excuse me.
I don’t think hedgehogs or foxes have smartphones on which to read a couple Financial Times headlines while they poop, unless they’re pooping on a Financial Times physical newspaper that was lying around in a park in South London. I sometimes wonder how I started reading the Financial Times. Something to do with my dad’s childhood and work and money philosophy. Something to do with being extremely ineffective at Model UN as a shy high school and college student (shyness basically means it’s impossible to get your name on resolutions, or whatever “winning” looks like at these things). I realized that being a part of the State Department would not lead to a whole lot of input to decisions, and would lead to a whole lot of stamping of passports for a whole lot of years. I am therefore convinced that a big part of my path was influenced by a couple of very idealistic international service classes (as the degree was known at the country-locationally eponymous American University (I love the word eponymous and go to great lengths to use it, often using it poorly)).
Anyway, it turns out that the “pragmatic” (please pronounce the shit out of that quoted one) business administration ideology is in fact just a church-ified manifestation of a Catholic-like non-Augustinian economistry (always trying to talk smack about economics and highly bureaucratic cultural empires, please give the book away when it gets annoying unless you bought it from arch-economists on a non-transferable license).
That paragraph was short. I need to drink a bit more coffee. I had some at hand, so there was only a few seconds delay between the last sentence and this one. These transitional time descriptions might be the extent of the plot you should expect in this thing (apparently a memoir, according to my far more knowledgeable about writing brother – autobiographies are meant to tell the whole story, at least up to the point that they’re being written (though not usually including the point they are being written, like I’m doing here – hopefully not too annoying to classify or consume, but such is the fate of readers who accept their lot and read from other writers)). These nested parenthesis are making me think of a walk that I was on recently in Wisconsin during which there were at least forty turkeys wandering around within forty yards of my friend and I. The male turkeys (toms) were, in almost perfect unison, shouting in the guttural way. It was like Gregorian chant (which I will have to Youtube after this, because I don’t actually know what one of those sound like). The feeling in one’s own chest made one (in this case me) feel as though I wanted to be a turkey to be fully experiencing whatever turkey instincts are triggered by that sound. Likely something orgiastic.
Coming out of a pandemic, the feeling of wanting to be around other people and music and perhaps a little intoxicant to quicken the instincts is almost overwhelming sometimes. When I forget to look at nature and remember that people are lucky enough to be able to write their own instinct stories up to a point and in the context of personal history, I breathe deep and look at the trees and the plants and the birds and the insects. And write a different story of a semi-orgiastic connection to everything. I read somewhere recently that looking at the stars can make one feel like one is going to fall off of the world. And now I feel that, even when I’m driving and look at the stars. I’d like to find a way to feel as though I’m going to fall into the sky when it’s blue and dotted with a few clouds, but my narratives and experiences around gravity and up and down are still pretty strong. Maybe one day. Oh, there it was a little bit. I like writing outside, I can test my thought experiments right away.
What chapter is this anyway? It feels like it’s been a long one, even though I’ve only got fifty minutes to write it, I’m spelling out number words that are supposed to be in numerals, and I stopped to do a fox/hedgehog in the woods in the middle. Must be good coffee, both for the speed and the forgetting.
When one of the little clouds move in front of the sun, it’s a relief. The brightness is not currently mediated by sunglasses, but it does make it possible to sit outside with just a sweater and sort-of-pajama-pants and a blanket next to me. So I’m not complaining, I’m just squinting.
For those of you that like plot, I’ll give you a little more. I’m planning a bike camping trip (foreshadowing!), have gotten a little shorter than six foot two in the last couple years (perhaps because of two several month stretch of eating extremely poorly in the last ten years), and quit my job a couple months ago. So much plot. Was that too much? Was that like serving a pork chop, a steak and a brownie all at the same time? The chapter is over.
Roman Ryan 