2023-01-24 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Tuesday 🗓 Date: January 24, 2023 📅 Week: Jan 23 – Jan 29, 2023

It’s 5:30am and I am fucking ready to go. It feels weird to have been so consistently getting up in the mornings, but I guess retreat made that way easier. I’m still having to slam a yerba in the morning in order to do that, but that’s a tradeoff I’ll take. I’m hoping I still have the willpower to meditate after this. If I can get that chain of events going consistently, I fear I’ll become unstoppable and transcend this mortal plane. That said, that also will take at least an hour even if I speed-type my way through morning pages, but I’ll still need to leave some other time out for “actual” writing on projects that’s not just the morning pages. Like if it takes me 40 minutes to write 1500 words of totally free-form writing, it’s going to take another 2 hours to write a thousand words of fiction. But that’s the life I’m headed towards anyways, hopefully.

Man, it’s so early I’m just trying to get my brain going. Brain, activate! HEAVE. I like the idea of “heave-ho” as a noun — I have no idea if it exists or not but I put it in my short story anyways. That’s one of the more fun parts of fantasy is inventing terminology and jobs just because you think they’d be fun. Like it’s probably a bad trope at this point, but I called a storyteller a Weaver — so fun! I think Name of the Wind just took a hold of my brain and now all of a sudden I like fantasy. Who knows, maybe it’ll just drip feed into my stories being a weird Frankenstein of fantasy, magical realism, literary fiction, weird cult film aesthetics, all mixed together. I obviously want other people to like it, but I also feel like I want to border on my writing being as close to the edge of illegible as humanly possible. For what it’s worth, I also think I’m a long way off from really hitting that limit, so it’s time to pump up the weirdness.

What else what else. I’m going in to work today for the first time in probably a few months, I bet I haven’t been in since like November at least, so that’ll be weird. I completely forgot that that’s a thing I do until late last night.

I’m going to Chicago in a few weeks, I should text Nhyta probably. I partially fear that that interaction will go terribly wrong, but if it does, I don’t think there’s really a way that things could get worse between us given that our current interaction is basically non-existent. Like if things went poorly, I assume we’d just end up here again. That said, I haven’t really thought about what would happen if things went well. I suppose I don’t really know what exactly I want out of this. I think there’s some subconscious part of me that supposes we could become friends or even get back together, although I legitimately, no bullshit, don’t think the latter is a good idea or even what I’d want if we broached that subject. I’m also not totally against it, but she’s a stranger at this point, let’s be honest. It’s been nearly four years since we’ve spoken, which is kinda weird to think about. But if I think about the amount that I’ve changed in the last 4 years, I’m sure she’d agree that I’m quite different as well. I imagine the core is still the same, just like I think is the case for myself, but that’s also a little bit about what worries me with her. There was a lot of underlying emotional work to be done with her, and as much as I tried, I couldn’t do that work for her. She did drastically change her life around the time we broke up from what I can tell, and that’s probably not a bad thing, but I don’t know how much of that is her attributing her problems to her job and how much of that inner transformation happened. Again, I hope for the latter, for her own sake.

I also need to figure out my hotel plans now, because I really should have done that forever ago. I’m only going to be there an extra few days, but that’s still potentially a few hundred bucks right there. Plus I’m going to freeze my ass off, so I need to prepare for that a bit methinks.

La dee da dee da dee da dee day ohhhhhh, it’s that part of the morning pages where I start singing Bill Wurtz. I’ve actually been listening to this Haruka Nakamura piano album lately, and that’s what’s been taking over my brain. It’s an album that’s just soft and fuzzy and lovely. I hesitate to say it’s capital-G Good, but it’s comfy. Comfort is an underrated quality, being cozy, settling in and feeling safe without having to think too much about it. Just being able to fall in.

I guess I don’t really know much comfy literature, although I bet I could think of some if I had to. There are books that draw you in, for sure, but they often still require some amount of work to understand the world they inhabit and so on.

Bllurrrrrrrrr, more words go here. Lots and lots of words. Words like a mountain top, words for every grain of sand in the Sahara, words for every snowflake in the arctic. I mean, not really, I only go up to 1500 words on these, but over time there will be that many. At this very moment it’s simply words about words, writing about writing, which is pretty naval-gazy, but that’s not too bad. I’m just letting whatever sits in my brain slowly trickle out onto this page, and at this very moment my brain is still waking up without much to say, so I’m both not thinking of all that much in particular and also still halfway asleep. This seems to be playing to my advantage though, because I haven’t really gotten distracted from these morning pages yet. I’ve just been typing and typing and typing with some soft piano music in the background, and nobody can stop me until I get to my morning dose of 1500 words. After this, I’ll meditate for a little bit and take a shower, and I’ll be able to go off into the world and kick ass, Reese the Bloodless, I don’t know. If I had one of those epithets, what would it be? Something to ponder. I like that Name of the Wind made that epithet a bit of a joke, they’re hard to take seriously.

I find that I’m using the word “kinda” a lot in these, and I think I also use them in my work-speech a lot. Maybe it’s because I’m getting the red squiggle of doom under it, but it’s really catching my attention as a way to water down my language. I water things down a lot to avoid seeming overly assertive or rude. I wanted to put an “I think” in that last sentence for that very reason. That’s sometimes a good thing in work-speech, especially when you’re trying to soften an assertion to people who you don’t know very well, but there are also times where you need your opinion to be a hard-stop. Ah well, so it goes. Something to acknowledge and move on.

I can finish all of today’s morning pages in about twenty minutes if I can bang out another 150 words in the next few minutes, which I think is totally possible. I don’t really know what more to write about — it’s time to wake up and get the day going. I drink way too much caffeine, but at the very least it helps me get going on mornings like these. The world is wide and days are short and there is much to do, lad. It’s time to buckle down, get the work done, and show the depths and breadth of our lives to all who walk this tiny speck of dust. Let us light the path and thus discover it for ourselves as well, for how presumptuous it would be for us to have the answers. At least I’m starting to understand where I want to shine the light, but that also means it’s high time to find out what’s there.