Category Archives: Writing

Starting to hear the sounds of the birds over the sounds of the keys, before I start touching the keys makes me think about orders of events. Sequences, the infrastructure of time. Time, the pretend gaps between sequences that pretends to add up. And here I am, in my own head again. Oxygen and breathing, seem to bring me back to the world. Commas misplaced as I trace the lines of the pathways. I am here. You are here. Let’s go down this road.

That was the beginning of the end of the middle. When I realized that it was always the middle and my haste to get to the end was misplaced. Haste faded under the lights of this lamp. And I relaxed into the book after hurrying through the poems. So relax.

I often consider. I have been under consideration for years. A or B (usually A, unless Mandarin class), meets expectations or falls below (falls below if I’ve been emotionally honest lately, a good day or night or a bad day or night (usually some sort of more confusing mixture between euphoric and guilty, rather than the prototypical poles).

When I learned that it was always both and many other things, at first I was angry. School, how could you. Work, you are a menace. All the people I’ve known, how did you not tell me? And me. Me. What was I thinking? And yet and so on. So here we are. I’m sitting and writing the story. A story. A bunch of words in a row. Enough that one could call what this is after it’s on pages or electronic pages a book. And that will be a new medium. Is this memoir? Am I authentically sharing the stream of consciousness with you? Is the reader of the audio book that doesn’t yet and may never exist enunciating in a way that annoys you? Does my breaking of the third wall lead you to put this book down and turn off the enunciating audio reader? I hope so. Because there is still a part of me that doesn’t want to be seen, heard or “read”.

Partly, it’s because reading words that have written leads to impossible to correct translation errors. You will read the word written and think, wow, what a fake pile of trash; clearly this was initially typed, not “written” with a pen and ink and paper. Or, more likely, you will read the word “written” that someone else is reading to you and will have to depend on the inflection change in this reader’s voice (who is also trying not to laugh at all the references to themself) to understand whether it’s in quotes and being referred to and if it’s about typing or pen and inking. But you’ll have a hard time guessing.

So I don’t like being misunderstood. It’s one of the dislikes that still causes sibling problems (if you have a brother, I expect you to understand this). And all other sorts of problems. Not that all the problems stem from this, please don’t misunderstand me. But you will ingest these words and feel whatever you feel, not whatever I’m feeling or hoping that you feel. And you’ll feel differently depending on the way you’re ingesting this writing. What am I supposed to do about this? Apparently become a Buddhist and not worry about anything, but if life isn’t worrying about whether you could possibly be having a more beautiful day or more delicious bite of food (which it is not about), aren’t we just worshipping death? No, I’m just as confused about Buddhism as you probably are, as you can see.

But why write anything? Why write something that might lead to being thought of or referred to as an author? Seems like a terrible mistake when I think too hard about it. But then writing seems to be about not thinking too hard and committing to a medium for long enough that the medium becomes at least a small compared to the other books on the shelves. Unless it’s a book of poetry. But I think I could already “write” one of those if I just found a way to print a book out of the posts on the Internet that I’ve already made.

Am I making this too complicated? Should I just start writing about something other than the fact of the writing that I’m doing right now? I don’t think so. This is one of the topics that I can write the longest about. It’s like a huge den of snakes that are all eating their own tails and as soon as it looks like they’re not going to be able to eat one more bit of their own bodies they pop and turn into two snakes. Kind of like starfish, I’m pretty sure.

So here we are, eating our tails and turning into more of ourselves. That might be a more concise definition of writing. Definitions have intrigued me for a long time. I remember when I was “working” out of a box in fifth grade. Apparently the way to learn about living in a box during the great depression is to get ride of the kids’ desks and put the kids in boxes for a while. We went with it, apparently. I had moved to a new school and a new state and a new time zone, not for the first time, and one of the only consistent identities that I had to lean on in the still fairly gentle world of elementary school (I was ten) was that of reading things that made people talk about how much of a “smart” “nerd” I was. It was not as good as having close friends, but it was orders of magnitude better than being invisible. So I read the dictionary in my box on the floor. I’m not sure if I was getting a flavor of the depression, but I was putting myself in a very specific box.

So reading was there. And sometimes I didn’t know how to pronounce the words I read that hadn’t been read to me. That’s why I’m giving you such a hard time if you’re out there, audio book reader. It’s because I appreciate you so much, now that you’re in my life. How was second grade me supposed to know what a moss kwit toe was from “m.o.s.q.u.i.t.o.”? Come on. So thank you. And if you laugh when you’re reading, don’t edit it out please, audio book editors. But that won’t happen now that I’ve mentioned it. It’s sort of like how light isn’t a wave if that’s how you’re thinking about it when you’re looking at it, and the reverse for the particle state. Or something to the observer effect.

Dancing around in the forest is something that I’ve done. Just writing that sentence, not having actually remembered if I had done such a thing, brought some intense memories to mind of ultimate frisbee tournaments where the music carried all the way to the edge of the field we were camping on and there was something like dancing. Or along the edge of a lake after much wine and a roaring fire and a cold night, and dancing. Dancing is something to do so that when you write a sentence about it, you remember more than weddings. Not that dancing at weddings isn’t nice, it just all runs together in the mind, unlike the memory of being in the Atlantic Ocean, naked, and making a mess of both my liver and my memory, dancing (middle of the day). And then you’d get to brag about it in a sort of memoir that you might write one day after you quit your job after you realized that good and bad are both always there but being attentive and kind are not always there.

Beyond dancing, writing, and small blood-sucking insects, my mind is. How to finish that sentence. Couldn’t add any more words, so I didn’t. Formulas are an annoying thing to know about, as are theories. If I could not know about them for a little bit without taking mushrooms, I would. But I’m holding mushrooms off as a fun thing to do much later in life. Because you can only do them the first time once. And I’m still a little afraid of the fragility of my mind. But every time I learn more about minds (though mostly bodies, since Descartes was wrong) I get less worried. Certainly I wouldn’t like my brain to be damaged “beyond repair”, but it seems like an organ that makes up its own rules to suit the moment.

So I wear a helmet when I’m on my bicycle. But I believe people when they tell me that you’re less likely to get hit by a car when you’re not wearing a helmet. Well, I’m less likely to hit the pavement with my bare head when I’m wearing my helmet, and I’m pretty good at waggling at just the right moment to make drivers feel nervous enough to slow down and go a little wider around. But please don’t read this book to anyone who drives, for I fear they might then resentfully drive close to me when I’m on my bicycle.

Fear is another one that I though, “oh, people don’t have this because they’ve defeated it”. In that way, the Stoics remind me of the Buddhists. The desire to eliminate a thing is the equivalent to obsession with it. And obsessions, while often creating toned calves, even more often create heart disease and car accidents. Or maybe not more often, I don’t have the data. But for every toned calf I see, I see at least one car accident. At least during the winter in Wisconsin. Perhaps I need to finally start that public sauna and change my calf:accident ratio dramatically. But that’s not why I’d be starting it. People are going to cover up their calves if they see this, for fear of being judged as not sufficiently toned.

Come to think of it, when does a chapter end? Does it end when one goes from talking about what one is doing and thinking into some kind of plot that follows narrative rules and reaches story equilibrium a little closer? Kind of like an episode of a TV show that is self contained but requires both a whole season and then entire library of episodes to understand? That seems a little too structured for what’s happening right here.

If you’ve stopped reading the paragraphs and are only skimming the first few words of each block, I understand (unless you’re being paid to read this book for audio publication). I understand you. Consider reading the rest, but it’s not even a request. Consider something.

This is where the plot middles. It’s April. It’s the tail end of a societal calamity. Or the beginning. There are honeybees. And flowers. And I’m sneezing from the pollen in the air. This is plot. This is the middle.

Writing is an act of definition, with finger paints. The paints are mixable and you can even add a little cayenne pepper to the red to make it the color you want (and so that if someone licks it, they get the equivalent of poison ivy training). But the thing is, the writer wants to be licked. By readers, by the attempt to write. Tennessee Williams thought success was the worst because Manhattan hotel room service didn’t actually taste good, in addition to being a thing that he should have been doing for himself. The word licked might need a little more definition if I’m going to keep using it. Might cause an issue for the translators if they are trying to make it translated directly into another language. Is this a mistake? It’s hard to tell. Maybe every author is making a pitch to have their readers learn their native tongue. It’s not entirely clear, but it’s entirely a good idea. And a bad idea. And language is a big distraction.

How could one write without language? Or about something other than language? Or with an intent that is other than the natural intent offered by language? I’m often convinced by the Marxists who tell me that everything is determined by structures, even though those structures were supposedly built by people (those builders were operating in structures that existed before them). Seems like a turtles all the way down sort of thing. And I’m willing to accept that. But at the same time, I’m going to try to write my way out of the turtle ladder, maybe mostly because one of them bit the skin between my thumb and forefinger and wouldn’t let go when I was a child. Is the working out of all the things that happened during childhood the same as transcending language, particularly if the turtles that bit you didn’t have anything to say to you before, during, or after? It might be. I’m not sure that’s acceptable though. Because working out, turtle, and childhood are all concepts that require additional work to work out what they mean (definitions). I wonder if the audio reader will say the words in that list as if they were in quotes (or as if there were not an Oxford comma). As I’ll be in Princeton tomorrow, I’ll ask the professor of this question to make sure. And then of course completely blow off the answer, like any good learner.

Moving on to another paragraph seems right. And wrong. What if the rest of the book were just a paragraph? What if editors actually let something like this get published? What if quantity replaced quality and then both were replaced by randomness as the king concepts of the world? These are the questions we’re all asking ourselves, staring out into the void of video calling while we write, together. And I say this because I’m writing this while on a video call (Zoom) with many other people, some of whom seem to be just waking up for their tomorrow in New Zealand. The London Writer’s Salon probably doesn’t have very many Londoners on it right now, as my clock that I keep glancing at says it’s almost 4pm Central Time, even through I’m on Eastern time.

So the tress are standing. Is that a part of the memoir of a forest? Could tree write a biography of its forest? Would it be able to print on paper without feeling tremendous remorse? Would it care at all about definitions, or would it grow and fall and feed without consideration for the way its interpreted by itself or anyone who might be listening in the mycelial network? I think I could write questions that I don’t actually want answers to for the next remainder of my life. I think I could. But that’s the end of chapter one. I think. Or could the whole book be chapter one?