Category Archives: Writing

It’s morning and still April. For all the plot lovers. Coffee is brewed as opposed to forced through an enormous machine. Something about letting it fall through a basket and filter rather than using the big thing. It’s a little like driving a kind of smelly car, when you first start it and back up, you get the stink of the car exhaust coming through the windows even when the windows are closed. And when I used the second person there, of course I meant the first person. My 1997 car does not emit friendship and flowers, and apparently even significant Saudi Arabia investment couldn’t come up with a clever enough scheme to capture, drop-off and re-use the emissions without making the car way too heavy and requiring way too much freon for cooling. Or other such technical challenges. But that’s why I’m getting rid of my car. At least right after this extremely long road trip, made longer by every wrong and right turn. And the left ones too.

Coffee seems to help, though it also seems to lead to me writing and saying things like “of course” and absolutely. Audio book reader, please make sure you make the quotes different sounding than the italics. I’m going to end up eating my words whole when my publisher eventually tells me that it will be best for the marketing of the book and the audio book for me to read it. I feel like all books read by the author ought to have an option that’s read by a professional and I’m not sure which should be more expensive. Without extensive training that I’m almost certainly not going to do, my reading of this book personally will result in high levels of difficulty if you try to speed it up to 3x. But hopefully it will be pleasant enough that you won’t want to. Not clear if pleasure is the reason people read, but I sometimes like it.

I think sometimes about that oat company that was making oat water (as the dairy farmers prefer you call it) and their advertising was just a friendly Swedish voice saying something like “we like it”. I wonder what the world would look like if everyone who did business things said “we like it” and meant it when they were talking about the things their businesses sold and did. Not sure how we would be able to have plastics if this were a thing, but I’d learn to live without them.

Plot though, it’s what the people want. Walked all over an ivy league campus today. These places seem to have created the end of the world, and they also feel like the end of the world in that foxes and osprey walk and fly around among the people and the geese poop a lot on docks. And you don’t (meaning I don’t) feel weird using italics when I’m at the coffee shop right outside of the campus, a coffee shop whose picture being sent to people who know this university town immediately know where you are and respond with excitedment and surprise.

Back to the plot. The walk including sibling conversation, fraternity social analysis, and the continuity of consideration of the possibilities of a world entirely derived from custom narrative. Do memoirs have plot? Or are memories static? Does plot imply activity? What is activity?

We’re back in the definitional muck. In the dictionary pond. With all the creatures interacting with each other in their custom ways. That’s the pond for you. Elementary school kids get graded on their microscope sketches of the pond, and the frogs get graded based on whether they get eaten or not. And morality.

It’s chapter two. What is the second chapter supposed to do? Take the introduction and continue to lead you down the path toward the rising action? That seems like a narrative framework that someone like Foucault would say leads to imperial capital accumulation and power relativity domination. So I’m going to go ahead and accidentally use it. Because free will is really just the collection of consciousness heuristics that seem to result in actions that are sometimes explainable in logical, rational ways so that the priesthood of economists can identify your level of utility to society and whether the definition of what you’re doing is employment or unemployment (or the third category that I’m currently living in: discouraged worker – an actual term for people who have decided to drop out of the “labor force” [please don’t forget to use the voice for quoted things on that one and the voice for things in brackets on this one]). If I let someone edit this, they’re going to be very annoyed with me, I expect.

But I digress to my expectations once again. What is it to expect? It’s to believe that oneself is an oracle and that your read of the chicken bones is accurate as you scatter them on the sidewalk. I have wished for the oracular abilities and read books in such a way to become the Delphic (and by read I of course mean I listened to the audio book reader professional and thought about whether I should be doing LSD to get the prediction results I want – since that’s what the oracles used to do obviously).

But I’ve had too much recent coffee to write inoffensively right now. But we talked about the vagueness of the definition of writing, and how it only finds clarity by being offensive, right? You’re with me right now, right? You understand.

And my presumptuousness flows like a river across the page, and you seem to be willing to paddle in it. But just like the fish blockers on the Chicago River, the water is electrified. So keep your hands and feed inside the vessel at all times, and do not under any circumstances use a metal paddle. If you do use a metal paddle, you will pay the shocking price.

Valuation is a constant distraction. The Priesthood that trained at the university right down the road from me has been relentless at infiltrating dictionaries and encyclopedias. Wikipedia is obsessed with valuation, even though the economists can’t stand the fact that it exists outside of its use in their pop social psychology textbooks that reinforce the notion that valuation is everything.

I got drunk on Nietzsche and stayed drunk for a long time. The idea of valuation as the solution to the silly problem of morality was the perfect concept for a person in their mid-twenties who felt the siren song of testosterone and didn’t lash themself to the mast. That was me, jumping off the ship into the waves to try to swim to an island full of economists in full Lord of the Flies mode. Trying to date the yoga instructor that Elon Musk was not yet dating and becoming a billionaire, what else would someone want to do with their time?

It turns out, a lot of other things. Smelling the flowers, for example. Even if it means that this April morning includes lots of sneezing. Apparently the sneezing can be reduced by eating a lot of honey that was raised locally and left raw. The conversations of undergraduates outside of the university without very much ivy on the wall entertains and dances through the writing mind. Their talk about Snapchat, political moderation, and being fun (all in the name of dating) is far more wonderful than trying to out-peacock Jeff Bezos. And so I’ll sit here and write rather than obsssing about valuation.

Is randomness the answer? I don’t think so. There’s no denying the feeling of better and until I find a way to do that (perhaps by meditating for ten years in a mountain shack), I’ll keep moving through the world and remembering that better exists. Sort of. At least in narrative form.

Is this a narrative? Is it coherent enough to be called a story? Sometimes I think the notion of stories is what suffocates best. The idea of being organized into a coherent path that can be understood quickly and easily in the Joseph Campbellian heroic sense seems to demean the disorganization that is the human body politic.

I’ve been thinking of my body as a political entity, as sort of legislative body that is meant to determine actions and feelings and physiological experiences. The kidney usually votes differently than the neocortex, and there are a lot of abstentions. Robert’s rules are rarely followed. It’s a cacophony. Direct democracy, though all the organs south of the skull complain that it’s a terribly run representative democracy and quote Winston Churchill bitterly.

It’s a sad thing to quote Churchill bitterly, at least that’s what my right brain claims. But who listens to that senator? Or is it a confederacy of states that have high levels of autonomy? Now we’re in the plot. Figuring out whether it’s the right thing to think of oneself as a series of cells or as one cell. Or as both.

It’s perhaps the wrong question. But can any question to be the wrong question? Apparently chapter two is about questions that clearly can’t be answered. And using words like clearly. But if this is going to be a book, we’ve only just begun.

There are flower petals falling on the keyboard as I type and the Gladiator soundtrack is starting to play in the back of my head. Elysium is here, but everyone around seems to be pretty alive. Particularly the well-dressed group that’s probably on their way to ask the Princeton foundation for money. But that’s me building narratives that it might be more productive to reject and learn as if I’ve not known anything ever before. One of them looks like an actor whose name I cannot remember, and that’s almost certainly influencing the assumptions I’m slapping onto the page. There are greetings and a dog happening around me as well. So it’s not really Gladiator.

And there are two extremely confident looking dudes talking about how much we should be investing in technology and dropping the name Amazon in conversation. I expect to meet them waiting in line to board a flight out of San Francisco one day. But I’m hoping not to be waiting on that line too many times in the next many years.

And it’s clearly seeping into my bones that this is being written on a London writing Zoom call, I’m using on as a preposition to articulate my relationship with “a line”. Again, audio reader, please do not forget to pronounce the quotes. Or if you’re reading this with your eyes and mind silently, add a little emphasis and a little but not too much scare quoteness to the quoted queue though previous.

Sometimes I get lost in my own sentences and have to come back to where I started. That’s probably true of this chapter. Does this feel like it’s part of the same book as the first chapter? Is my kidney a thing in itself or a part of my body? Is that determined by the fact that I’m connected to the kidney physically? Is this chapter being stored in the data center right next to chapter one? And if it gets printed, it will be connected to the same spine.

I’m noticing that I’m running out of steam. Time to drink a little more coffee. I can always tell when my fingers and mind are wearing out when I start having to edit mistakes as I go. Normally I can just power through without editing anything (something that I’m going to have to fight with the publisher about if they ever exist).

My brother and I were talking about asking the ivy league students in the coffee shop what papers they were writing and for what classes and writing papers for those classes and submitting them. It’s everyone’s favorite fantasy: getting Robin Williams as your therapist after doing the janitor math problem thing. How about them flowers?

Asking for people’s number. Such a strange thing. What’s your social security number so I can look you up on Facebook and buy you a cup of coffee the next time you’re feeling low energy and starting to correct your sentences after you write them instead of doing it right the first time? That’s what I want to know.

I love paying more for a cup of coffee to buy the next person’s cup of coffee. It’s like getting and drinking an extra cup of coffee, particularly if it’s cloudy and cold outside and entirely for me.

I’m distracted by my smartphone. Waiting for a call from a surgeon to hear good news. The coffee heightens the waiting but also makes it more bearable. Something about a distraction from an importance inside of a life that one thinks about too much. And by one, I again mean me. And by too much I of course mean the right amount. And by of course, I obviously mean partially maybe.

Uncertainty is one of the greatest strengths a person could have. To cultivate and continue being uncertain is like growing a redwood tree from scratch. It takes a long time, it could always blow over, and it’s easier if you’re around other people who are also growing similar trees.

I wonder about literary analysis and how to avoid it. English classes teach people how to not see in a way that is blinding to remember. But less and less blinding as I blame my education for fucking me up less and less. But it’s still there, scratching me in places that are not itchy.

The paragraph is a strange thing. It’s another question of bodies politic. Writing outside seems to make my hands damp in a way that slows me down, and thus the paragraphs are a little shorter in chapter two. But it also could be that my laptop is slow to accept the things my fingers are inputting, so my eyes keep getting worried that my fingers are not doing what my neocortex is requesting. I love seeing my friends where I don’t expect them even if I was meant to expect them. It makes my paragraphs longer, if you know what I mean. It will be interesting to see what the audio book reader will do with that sentence. I don’t have any recommendation, I’m not even sure what I would do with it if I have to read it.

Have to is a difficult thing. I’m not sure if I believe in it. But of course it exists. But of course that’s the coffee talking. Is it worth stopping? It might be worth slowing down. But because time doesn’t exist, there’s no denominator with which to measure your speed.

Sometimes people have complained that I make everything more existential. And it’s almost always me complaining, I actually can’t think of a time when other people have complained about such a thing.

Now the undergraduates are talking about orgo. And rising sophomores. Eavesdropping is wonderful, it makes it seem like there’s actually a plot when I’m writing about it. It’s less existential, maybe because it actually exists. There another person talking about fundraising with another sweater-wearing person. Transitions discussions. “Go for it.” Chapter two seems to be over.