2023-02-19 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Sunday 🗓 Date: February 19, 2023 📅 Week: Feb 13 – Feb 19, 2023

I’m being a lil’ bitch and not writing as much this weekend. I’m thinking a lot about Wolf in White Van at the moment, about how the characters there are so evocative that I read the whole book in one go yesterday. Perhaps it comes from my own draw towards escapism, moreso in literary novels than in science fiction and fantasy like in Sean’s case, but I really loved the ideas laid out in the book: how the relationship between child and parents evolved, how the case of Carrie and Lance played out. The ordering of events I thought was wonderful: it wasn’t purely in any sense of order, but instead told essentially three stories out of order, sometimes each story being told forwards or backwards or both.

But what was so comforting, at least for me, was that there wasn’t a huge reliance on a huge cast of characters to tell an engaging story. Maybe I got The Name of the Wind too stuck in my head, so it was refreshing to read something much the opposite: a fairly small cast, a metered plot, and a very internally-focused narrative.

It feels like a good place to be for me — I had this idea yesterday of something like in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle where there’s the old man (Mr. Honda), with whom the main couple meets regularly. I thought that could be a good way of integrating someone like Higuchi into my own story — someone noted for their trustworthy advice but who often simply goes off the rails or is somewhat nonsensical. Similarly, I liked the idea of a few large, clarifying events working as pin points throughout the novel, and gradually fleshing those out as we go. In WIWV, it’s the gunshot, his discharge from the hospital (and by extension, the writing of Trace Italian), and finally the trial of Lance and Carrie. In my case, I’m not totally sure what they’ll be yet.

I listened in on some conversations yesterday at Cafe Reveille. Well only one, really. It was two guys, probably about my age or a little older, basically covering all the mess of their interwoven friend group. Many of them had had some kind of romantic relationship, long or short, and it meant that basically everyone involved had touchy feelings going on, each step increasingly walking on eggshells. It was both interesting to listen to — the politics going on at Hi Tops, the subtle subversions of what I could only assume to be a trivia league — and oddly gratifying to feel like those weren’t the sorts of problems I had. As much as I occasionally feel lonely or feel lacking in my social life, I really enjoy simply not having those problems. I enjoy my biggest problems often being “I didn’t write as much as I would’ve wanted to.”

It reminded me a bit of what I was reading in 4000 Weeks, which had this whole discussion about why we do what we do, and how often we do things because we want to have done them. That is, we want to travel so that at dinner parties we can talk about how fun the traveling was, not because we want to do the traveling itself. And I often feel that with my social life — I want to have one because in the future, I want to be able to tell people about what I did with my friends, or I want to have a large party of groomsmen if I ever got married. I want to get married because I feel like it’ll get my family off my back, not because I actually want to get married.

In reality, the things I want to do are simpler. If anything, often the reason I want to do things is simply for the assurance that I’ve done them and that I’m not missing out. I want to go skydiving not because it sounds fun, but because I know I’ll get someone going oh you should really do it if I don’t, or that I’ll be lying on my deathbed thinking that’s something I should’ve done.

But what if I was lying on my deathbed saying oh I should’ve written that novel? What then? It’s the road of commitment, and in some ways, committing is part of the problem, or at least the difficulty. But simultaneously, that committing reduces the set of choices I have to make, and that’s what I want anyways. That’s why I’ve had this thought of moving somewhere in the middle of nowhere and huddling over a notebook and cranking out a book. Because the pain that comes from constantly having to decide is simply too much. Of course, I say it’s too much — I can absolutely handle it, but it does leave so many avenues open. Part of that is seeing people all the time, and I kinda don’t like that, if only because seeing people so often makes me feel like I need to have something interesting to say to them. Of course, this seems to work out just fine with Dan, mostly because we’re interested in the same things, and we can conversationally investigate our inner worlds much more effectively than most, which doesn’t really require me to talk about what I did last weekend or whatever.

I guess that contrasts a bit with my relationship with Tania, which is somewhat the opposite as mine with Dan. I feel like our discussions there are much more about what’s going on in life, and that probably comes a bit from a lack of emotional intimacy between us. I don’t really have a good sense of what’s going on in her mind, or when I do it always feels really negative or judgmental. I feel like every time we talk, she’s complaining about something, and I have basically no patience for that.

My freezer just made a noise like the blood-curdling scream of someone having their soul ripped from their body, a mile away.

Anyways, I’m going on a hike with both of them in a few hours, so we’ll see how that goes. It’s always an interesting thing, because it mixes those two relationships in weird ways. Hiking has always been a bit of a sacred space for me and Dan, but Tania occasionally joins in as well, and it’s never bad, but the topics are generally way more concrete. They tend to fall more into the category of “what are you going to do with your life” instead of “what are the psycho-emotional events that drive what you’re doing with your life,” which in a way is probably a good thing for me. It forces me to be no-bullshit about the things I want in life. It forces me to say: I want to write a novel. In fact, I’ve always wanted to write a novel, but I never have. And here’s the plan I have for how I’m going to do it.

And that, I’ll say, deeply scares me. It does! That commitment, that hunkering down and saying to people going forward, I can’t, I have to write, is insane. It’s nonsense! But it’s deeply necessary. I really think it is, and it reminds me a bit of what I did when changing careers in college, although this time a bit less on autopilot.

But I’m sitting here writing this, and it does feel a bit like a turning point. It feels like I’m sitting here admitting this to myself, that this is the path I want to go down. That I know that I can get nourishment from this path, and that that’s deeply necessary for me. Even though sitting down to write and get something on the page can be painful, that I may procrastinate to the ends of the earth, that I need to do something there.

So with that, I’m going to take that onwards into the rest of my day, and it’s time to get up and get going to get ready.

An aside, today I was markedly less sidetracked by twitter and youtube and so on, and that’s great! I don’t know where that comes from, but I feel less distractable today. Perhaps that’s because I woke up feeling pretty rested today and went to bed early last night so this morning was less painful, but who knows. Oh well, just acknowledging that I did this whole thing in about 30 minutes, which is way less than usual.

You’re not inferior to anyone. I love you. Have a good day, be deeply yourself; no one can do that for you. I’ll see you tomorrow.