2023-02-25 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Saturday 🗓 Date: February 25, 2023 📅 Week: Feb 20 – Feb 26, 2023

It’s been a few days now, dang. I think Wednesday is the last day I sat down for long enough to actually get anything out, and it’s mostly because even before then I was trying to substitute “morning pages” with simply “writing in the morning,” which I think was not a great idea. Writing that happens to happen during my morning pages is great, but not something I should explicitly replace. I like the feeling of just letting my thoughts spill out onto the page a bit.

I’m writing in a coffee shop for now — Flywheel, by the park — and it’s fun to sit here writing all these things out while just watching people. A mother with her young son by his side, tumbling over on the floor. The man in that seat before was sitting waiting for a girl, although I can’t tell if she’s yet willing to be called his girlfriend. The myriad personalities of dogs, both the tiny terrors sprinting towards the freedom of the park and the lazy ones that sploot on the cool floor.

Some folks on their phones. I always wonder what they’re looking at. None of them are smiling.

Of course, I’m making myself sit and write this, even though I had stories on my way here. I had so many thoughts before, a lot about the way that people talk in Raymond Carver stories. The way people say what they need but never ask for it. That people don’t always know how to ask. I know I don’t.

That’s a bit of what’s so striking about the opening story of WITAWITAL — that the man asks for what he wants, that he asks the couple to come in for a drink and to dance together, and that that’s almost what’s shocking about it. It’s a bit shocking that he got what he asked for, and that’s why the girl feels the need to tell that story in the first place. And then he asked me to dance, she laughs, drunk from experience, amazed at the possibilities.

There’s surely the suspension of reality there, that perhaps taking a drink from him isn’t safe, of course, but that’s not the story. The story is about what happens if they did say yes.

I had this thought with the park story, that part of what’s intriguing for me is the thought that I didn’t ask of the girl what I wanted to at the time. That it almost seems ridiculous to ask it, and that surely that would be the story that she tells to her friends. There’s that ill-fated line from “Why Don’t You Dance?”: “you must be desperate or something.” I love that line, but I also hate it — it burns into my skin, mostly because it’s confirming the thing I don’t want it to. But that’s also the story: the girl tells that story not because it’s inherently funny, but because she’s trying to figure it out. She says it’s ridiculous but doesn’t know why. Why not ask for the thing you want?

And so it is in the park: what happens when someone asks the girl for the thing he wants? Why don’t they dance to the drum music? Why don’t they grab a drum? Why not? And what happens if they do?

I’m sitting in this coffee shop and I see so many couples, and some of them terrify me. Like this guy puts his face so close to his girlfriend’s, who routinely leans away because he’s uncomfortably close. It looks like he’s in the face of someone he’s about to murder in the bathtub. He moved away from her as he puts milk in his coffee, but it still weirded me out for a bit.

I feel like I’ve written so much here, and yet it’s only a few hundred words. Sometimes I wonder how people create these sprawling novels, but I suppose I could also dive into many of these interactions more. I also like the succinctness though. I like people saying what they want.

There’s that passage from Several Short Sentences on Writing where they talk about the importance of short sentences. The importance is that short sentences allow you to see through what you were trying to say to see what you didn’t think you could say. What are the things we don’t know we have in us?

Maybe that’s what’s so good about WWTAWWTAL (I realized halfway through this that the title is What We Talk About, not What I Talk About), that it’s really about saying the things we didn’t know we could. We didn’t know we had the license to ask about the things we wanted. We didn’t know we had the agency to murder those girls who kept cycling past us. We didn’t know what made us so unhappy.

Of course, there are the ways in which we’re happy but we don’t know how to say it or even see it. We don’t know all the ways of seeing that make us happy. In some ways, they maybe protect us from being sad, but perhaps we just never know. There’s a protection in that. It keeps us afloat.

One thing about writing is the usage of weasel words. I certainly have those, but my bigger problem is weasel punctuation. I use em-dashes as a crutch. They should be periods.

Even in that last sentence, I probably would have written “I use em-dashes as a crutch — they should be periods.” But they’re two separate sentences. Maybe it’s like David Foster Wallace said in his writing classes: if your usage of a semicolon isn’t Mozart-esque, it’s probably wrong.

The men next to me are talking about SEO. I hate San Francisco at moments like this. They’re about to leave, I think. Maybe it’s because they’re reading this. Please talk about something else.

That said, I suppose just about everywhere people will talk about work. There’s a reason I didn’t like my last offsite. Normally, when people drink, we should talk about more interesting things, or at least things we care about. At the offsite, we just got drunk and talked about Sorbet. I’d rather be upstairs reading. I don’t really know how to talk about the things I like to talk about, though. I really enjoyed my meditation retreat, and I’d like to hear about someone else’s experience with something like that. But that’s a rare experience.

I finally talked to Ilya a bit about books. Turns out he’s a big literary fiction fiend. We talked about Don DeLillo for while since I was wearing my stupid DeLillo/Dunkin Donuts shirt, but that shirt gives me a fair number of compliments, I gotta say. Ilya and the guy who runs the tickets at the Roxie both loved it and said he was one of their favorites.

The rest of my plan for the day is to wrap things up here, walk on over to Green Apple Books, hang around for a bit and maybe find something new, and then probably head home and read/write for the rest of the afternoon. I should eat at some point as well. And maybe walk around the park a bit.

Days like this are mostly great, except the weather is pretty annoying. It’s noncomittal. It will either rain or it won’t.

Okay, my mind is mostly blank at this point. I’ve jumped between enough topics and said my piece about all of them. It’s about time to go, but I need to get to my precious 1500 words. We’re not that far away, but I always do find it a little odd when I get to this point.

I didn’t have to kick it into high gear this time, perhaps because I didn’t do this for several days so things were pent up inside of me. For that matter, that might be why I haven’t slept well at all recently. Every morning I’ve just woken up and started working, which makes me sick to think about.

I didn’t really talk about my sleep today, and I didn’t bitch and moan about wanting to quit my job. I’d love to do that. I’d love for us to get that sweet, sweet tender offer and to live off of that for a year or two. I could work a bit more and then not work until I’m 30, if I really wanted to, and if taxes didn’t completely hose my savings. No reason to wait until I’m 60 to enjoy life.

I’ve reached my required number of words here, so I’ll leave you this. Go now and remember: you have been redeemed, and you are being redeemed. So go.