2023-02-11 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Saturday 🗓 Date: February 11, 2023 📅 Week: Feb 6 – Feb 12, 2023

No thoughts, brain empty. The only thing I’m noticing this past week is just how fragile so many of my habits still are. It’s easy to think that once you get in the groove of things, you’re set forever. But I’ve been really good about doing my morning pages and reading in the evening and all that, and even with all that I still feel a bit overwhelmed after this week.

Side note — this cafe (Intellegentsia coffee by Millenium Park) just played “Angelina” by Pinegrove, and I think this might be the only time I’ll ever hear that song in public. That said, if any Pinegrove song were fitting to play in a coffee shop, a banger like Angelina is the right one.

Anyways, back to my earlier point. It did remind me just how shitty drinking is. It does suck the life out of so many things. While I do feel like I can be reasonably aware most of the time still, I can tell that my tendency to dissociate and zone out was way stronger this week. It was partially exhaustion as well, but by Friday, I couldn’t really handle it. Last night, I fell asleep so early and slept for 12 hours simply because I didn’t feel like I had any of the energy left. I don’t feel so strongly that alcohol is bad on the like societal level that I feel like it should be banned or anything, but I feel like it’s bad enough on an individual level that I’d probably feel better about going sober during, say, work events and things like that. Other folks on the team do it, and all in all I’d feel better about doing it myself as well.

One of the other reasons I don’t feel super great at the moment is that I really haven’t touched on any of the story threads I left around earlier in the week. They feel really distanced now, and I should put some time to at least take out my notebook and recenter on them again today. It reaffirms to some degree my thought that intensity in writing is simply revisiting the topic over and over again so that you work on it in the background constantly. It leads to moments like what I had the other day where I could just see the whole scene all at once.

I also feel a bit emotionally in a slump related to them — I feel like they’re really distant at the moment. I don’t have that same felt sense for why I loved them. I think to some degree it’s going back to the idea of being silent. I noticed that my inner monologue has been far more chatty this week, and not in a helpful way. It requires some amount of silence to let the seeds of each of those stories to grow and build, to let the characters rise up. I also think, to some degree, that I’ve focused much more on plot and not enough on characters. Who are the people we write about? That may be related to the way I often feel distant from friends and family, but I also love watching people and feeling like I just know them, which is possibly unhealthy. Ugh.

Funny how the first third of these morning pages always feel like a slog, and then the next two thirds feel like they simply happen. Perhaps because a third of the way through is usually where I feel like I have very little left to say, but hey, gotta get to those 1500 words.

For the sake of returning back to the stories — if you were to find something strange in the house of your (great?-) aunt who hoarded for most of her adult life, what would you find? Or better yet, what are you looking for? Is your relationship with her, or with your parents’ families, healthy or strained? I think it was Matt Bell (quoting someone else, but let’s forget about this for now) who talked about turning characters not towards what’s most right but most interesting or revealing. So let’s go with that and say the family relationship is strained. Strained in what way? Every happy family is the same, but every sad family is miserable in their own way, so they say. Strained largely because of some deep dark secret, obviously, but the family wouldn’t have known that. But keeping a secret like that implies going to great lengths to protect it, which from an external perspective may seem nonsensical. Arbitrary rules, random disappearances, and so on. That’s a valuable thought, but I think I’d need to work backwards here — how you protect it is directly correlated with what you’re protecting, in this case. Family dramas here are somewhat uninteresting though — I think this needs to have “global” (or at least, outside-of-the-nuclear-family) implications. But not literally global, I don’t think I’m trying to write a thriller here.

Let’s just go ahead and rule out the things that are cliche, finding something maybe by removing all the other things. Having a secret family or second life, that’s old and played out. Someone was adopted or whatever, that’s a story as old as time.

See here’s where I start to flounder a bit — I both feel the need to know what I’m writing “about” and the desire to just ramble forever, but the former feels too constructed and the latter feels like I’ll get caught too much in the details and not be able to think creatively about the overarching narrative.

I quite like the thought of multiple narratives playing out from the same base, like multiple ways the same thing could play out based on the same starting point. One time you enter the house and you find a picture of your grandmother with a different man, only to find out that your family history isn’t what you thought it was. Another time you go in and find a safe with classified documents, another you find details of a hidden bank account with millions of dollars stashed away, in another you find the declaration of independence and Nicholas Cage comes and tracks you down. In the final version you decide to ignore all of that and burn the house down. There are plenty of options here, and thinking of them in the aggregate would be fun. But in those cases, I’m not totally sure what you’re working towards yet. Are you really trying to find the truth about your aunt, or are you trying to learn something about yourself? And what is that exactly?

I find myself coming back to that style of story a lot, and I think it’s worth leaning into a bit. It’s the thing I’m most drawn to, and I think I’m drawn to it because it does tap into some underlying fear — that there are so many choices in front of me, and that making the wrong one changes the entire course of my life. Seeing that they all bleed into one another, that they all are interconnected as part of the same building blocks, is important. I should probably read The Tatami Galaxy book to see what he does about this in written form. I love the show, and it’s such a big influence that I’d like to see what can be done with that. The excerpts I read were wonderful.

That said, I’d really like to not just rewrite that book — the main character of that novel is in many ways where I’m starting from, how self-pity in many ways is the underlying force that brings him back to the same place. I wonder what would happen if we replace the self-pity in that book differently. What happens with different kinds of misfortunes, with different social structures, and so on. What happens if that book doesn’t take place in college, but in high school, or in jobs. Oooohh, a character leaving college and taking various different jobs would actually be so fun. What happens if you become a librarian, a door-to-door salesman, a TV actor, a monk, an accountant, a professional poker player, or a teacher. The opportunities there feel ripe. Something about a character not fueled by self-pity, but fueled by the thriving to be famous or well-known. To have various role models, that he wants to be known as Mother Theresa, Billy Mays, or $FAMOUS_POKER_PLAYER.

Okay well, I think I’ve come down to a good spot — that sounds like a fun story that’s more up my alley. Funny how that works out. Anyways, I have a full day to myself in Chicago, so let’s see how this goes. I’m off to the Art Institute to pretend I know what I’m doing and maybe to come up to a bit more inspiration for people, characters, or whatever. I love you, you’re not inferior to anyone. Good night, I’ll see you in the morning.