2023-01-05 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Thursday 🗓 Date: January 5, 2023 📅 Week: Jan 2 – Jan 8, 2023

Today is the first day of Morning Pages! Isn’t that cool. I’ll admit to feeling a little weird doing this, just because I’m sitting here recognizing all my anxieties. Like isn’t it a little strange to “want to be a writer” but not really know what to write? Isn’t it a little strange to basically have nothing to say? I mean, well I have a lot to say, but it feels like a whole lot of nothing. I guess that’s the point, huh.

Well anyways, wanting to be a Writer has taken up a lot of those journal entries and things I’ve used before, so I suppose it’s both (a) a big anxiety of mine, and (b) a big goal of mine, so I guess it’s a good thing to try and kill two birds with one stone, eh.

Sometimes I get this weird tingly sensation in my “third eye” kinda region, and I think I’ve at times mistaken it for concentration or mindfulness. In many cases it’s caffeine, although I’m not so sure what it is right now. I’m both currently unwinding after a busy-ish work day, so I don’t think it’s being relaxed or anything, and I don’t feel like I’m quite in a deep concentration state at the moment either. I’m admittedly a little anxious about the word count here; I mean, 1500 words is _ a lot_. We’re only like 20% of the way there, but maybe just having that many words on a page will add up over time. 365 days of 1500 words is just under 550k, so about 10-ish novels. In some ways, the fact that my frame of reference is a novel probably points back to those same anxieties again, huh.

Well anyways, that’s mostly what’s on my mind. Like I said, who the hell is easily filling up 1500 words with “what I’m thinking.” Actually, I’m wrong there — filling up 1500 words is easy, it’s mostly just that I get distracted so easily. One of the ways this is like meditation is that it’s bringing my attention back to the page, over and over again, while I watch all the thoughts in my mind go by. A bit different — the thoughts go through my fingertips instead of into and out of whatever pond-lake-ether-void-imaginal-space makes up your mind — but the same general idea.

Sitting meditation is weird in that way. Like, the thoughts aren’t you, but the pond-lake kinda is, maybe. Although I don’t even know if that’s true, because I can feel “myself” “watching” the mind-pond, and so who or what the “myself” bit there is doesn’t really make sense to me. I still don’t have a felt sense for the fact that “I” don’t “exist” (apologies for all the quotes here, person-who-will-never-read-this, unless you are reading this in which case I’m famous hi YouTube hi chat hi future biographers hi mom and dad hope the world is still kicking around and totally cool and hasn’t descended into chaos yet).

I’ll say that I kinda can feel something falling away now. Writing this much does actually feel physically (currently) a bit closer to a meditative state, because I have a bit more sensory clarity: I can hear just how loud my goddamn refrigerator is, and I can feel that subtle shimmer in my feet and arms, that bodily static that’s probably just the electricity of my nervous system or (hand-wave) something.

Basically the way I’m thinking of stuff to write at the moment is just looking around my house and seeing what pops into mind. One, is Home Comforts, a guide to keeping house, which is something that Cindy Williams did her best to instill in me but that I’m still hopelessly bad at. Like, I don’t think I ever properly wash my clothes — I put them into lights and darks and delicates and then kinda just yeet them into the washing machine however I feel like it that day. I just got a really nice, very soft sweatshirt today, and I have a terrible feeling I’ll ruin it the moment I wash it. We gotta protect that shit, it’s too nice and too soft and comfortable and I already love it.

I’m going on retreat next week, so hopefully I don’t totally lose this habit by that time. It’s kinda nice to just let my fingers do all the work here, and it’s also kinda funny to see little phrases bubble up (like pond-lake-ether-void-imaginal-space) that are funny little amalgamations of how my mind approaches something. The field of potential worlds ahead feels vast and the cows are grazing the grass is plentiful but never needs to be cut (thanks cows). I also feel slightly more unhinged, but in the good way, in the way that’s not “unhinged” but “less constrained,” more like words just kinda fall out of your brain like crumbs out of a napkin. I don’t know what that metaphor was but it was the first thing that popped into my brain. Like you know if you were at a restaurant and then you got crumbs on the napkin in your lap but then you stand up and they get everywhere. Yeah, like that. Can’t wait for that one to end up in my Great Works.

So uh, here we are, huh. Like 900 words or so in. I’ve just been typing for like 20 minutes straight, probably, and that’s a lot, but it does feel therapeutic. I should try and do all this stuff in the morning more. Early morning wake up call, here I come. Ah shit, I’m gonna be so under-caffeinated on retreat, I should probably start cutting back this weekend to try and beat the symptoms a bit. Just start chugging water instead. I had like 400mg of caffeine today, that is so bad. I should go get some water actually. (Is that just an excuse to stop writing for a sec? You tell me.)

Okay, water acquired and consumed. Does caffeine kinda dehydrate you? I know it constricts your blood vessels or something, so I wonder if that just makes me feel dehydrated. I thankfully didn’t get a big caffeine headache today, but I did a few days ago. I don’t know, brother, this is just a bad habit at this point. Like I could just drink water or a sports drink or something in the morning and that’d be just fine, but nooooo, I need to have yerba or some dumb shit like that.

Ghosts. That word just popped into my head. Ghosts are a weird idea, but also not. I mean, the white-bed-sheet versions of ghosts are kinda dumb, but I guess the energy of someone hanging around is totally normal? Thinking of most things as energy is pretty valuable, in my opinion. The energy flowing through your blood vessels, the energy of groups, of planets, between the stars. It’s all their is really, energy and matter and the conversion between the two. I don’t really know where I’m going with this, but the train of thought got me there. One of the interesting things about writing all these thoughts down is that the original “ghost” thought for me would normally just get swallowed up as noise, and yet here it is, in plain English. I’m so close to the word limit, it’s almost there.

I read Lincoln in the Bardo recently, what a novel. I think I’m just a sucker for style, and that’s something Saunders does so well. Like, it’s bold, it’s weird, but it’s also totally comprehensible and never academic. I feel like I was just sitting by a campfire in purgatory listening to old souls (literally) talking about the halcyon days of yore. Although now that I think about it, the souls were, from the perspective of the story, really telling it from heaven/hell/the whole afterlife and not purgatory, since they were telling the whole thing in the past tense. Ah well, so it goes.

The most moving part of that novel, really, was not so much the story of Lincoln — moving though it was — but the relationship between the main three storytellers. They made the afterlife both magical and dreadful-enough and murky and lovely in all the ways a story should be. I feel like the whole book had that soft green misty glow, dripping with ectoplasm or ghost-stuff or whatever makes up a soul. And so what does make up the soul, you may ask. Whimsy, whimsy I tell you. Or potatoes, or toe-nail clippings. That’s where all the socks go when you lose them in the dryer — they go to the bardo. (I think that’s a good place to end things.)