2023-03-07 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Tuesday 🗓 Date: March 7, 2023 📅 Week: Mar 6 – Mar 12, 2023

I‘m being a little toxic about my approach to productivity here, I think. The internal monologue for encouraging myself to write is pretty negative. Let’s turn that around:

I’m proud of how much better I’m getting about thinking analytically about what I’m reading, and I’ve had the resilience to come back to story ideas over and over, which is certainly more than I can say about the past. I feel like I’m actually coming up with stories and seeing them more in places around me. For example, I’m sitting here in a Peet’s in the middle of the Castro, and I could probably pick out about 4 different stories from some of the folks around me. I’m really enjoying just sitting here, seeing all the people around me, and considering all the ways in which they could be walking through the world.

I just reread Slaughterhouse-Five, and it’s still an incredibly good book. One line that I didn’t remember from it but really love now is this one:

What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

That’s Vonnegut’s description of Tralfamadorian novels, many marvelous moments seen all at one time. That kicked my ass, if I’m being honest.

You know, a lot of the things I put in my notebook from before are way more anxious. Will you still be there for me? is the Pinegrove lyric that rings in my ears all the time. It’s that feeling of loss, of holding tightly to something that we’re uncertain about. The beauty of many marvelous moments seen all at once is that it feels overflowing with love.

That really clicked something into place for me about the painting story that I really wanted. I had this feeling that the main character wouldn’t actually make it out of the painting; instead, they’d decide to stay there. They’d realize the title of that Claire Rousay album: everything perfect is already here. The painting, the bar, despite all its sadness and listlessness, was a collection of beautiful moments being taken in all at once. It’s that tender longing for someone you once loved, it’s the self-love required to take oneself out all alone, it’s the affection of dancing with someone you could love but aren’t sure about yet, it’s the trust in being vulnerable to a stranger. Bars get a bad rap, I think, and sometimes for good reason, but in their essence is that communal spirit that we’re missing. That’s something that bars in Europe seem to have gotten right: they’re about coming together with your broader community, stopping by the pub, not about going out with your existing friend group. Pubs there seem to create connections, not just reinforce existing ones. (I feel like I’m thinking about rewriting The Night is Short, Walk on Girl, but that’s for another day. This is perhaps just a love letter to it.)

I’m also just extremely stressed from work. I hate how much I’m growing to dislike my job, although admittedly it’s just this particular week where I feel like I have some people breathing down my neck to get stuff done. Like it may take the rest of the week, just chill. We’ll get there.

So anyways, I’ve managed to spread the writing of this journal out between a coffee shop and now the shuttle, let’s see how many more venues we can get! (Although without breakfast in the office, I’m even less inclined, but I pulled myself up by the bootstraps to do it today.

I was thinking a lot about the way Vonnegut writes characters. It’s funny that he equates himself a lot with Kilgore Trout, who it is made clear is a terrible writer but with good ideas, because part of that bad writing is what makes him interesting. But I think there’s a way he writes characters that’s particularly Tralfamadorian — he writes with these omniscient narrators who know everything there is to know about a character. For example, I’m going to write this poorly but I could see him writing a character like this:

Carrie saw an old friend across the street, a boy from her old elementary school. She stalked up behind him, crouching low like a tiger in tall grass. She jumped and pushed him against his shoulders. He jumped and nearly fell in the bushes. Carrie enjoyed surprising her friends this way. It was endearing to her. She did this to everyone, at least until the day she scared someone so bad they socked her in the jaw.

This is clearly not very thought through, but you get the idea. The narrator can see both why she does it and can see far off into the future and past to give more color to the context in which characters do things. Usually, the rationale for doing these things is qutie a bit more convoluted. For example, Carrie may have enjoyed surprising her friends this way because she was actually a Russian spy in the POW camp, and she thought this surprise was a good form of practice for snooping around.

This way of characterization is pretty fun, although it’s a little distancing. After reading Slaughterhouse-Five, I can better articulate one of the ways Vonnegut suffers a bit as a writer, which is that his characters are pretty flat. Everyone’s fairly consistent: Billy is even-keel yet happy, Paul Lazarro is rotten and vengeful, Edgar Derby is patriotic and loyal, Valencia is dull and needy. There’s not a ton of dimension to them. I wonder if there’s a way of combining that distanced, omniscient narrator with the clarity of the existing prose. Hmm.

It’s something worth experimenting with. I think Vonnegut does this successfully in the moments where he talks in the first person, for example. That’s where, at least to me, many of the most powerful moments in the book come through.

I’m in the shuttle on my way to work as I write this, and I can look out into the mountains and on the sun glimmering over the sea. That feels like what life is. I feel a little depressed at modernity, but I don’t want to. I want us to feel like modernity is taking us to the right place, where it’s an earnestly human-centered approach to making our lives better, but sitting here right now, it feels like it’s technology playing off us. It feels like technological progress is a parasite that’s killing its host.

My take here isn’t so much about AI, although that’s perhaps an excitation of the whole ordeal. My thought here is more about the basics. Why am I in this shuttle right now? Why do I do my job? Why am I here having this existential crisis? It seems like the search for meaning is due to us not knowing how to have leisure time, or now knowing what all this is for. It feels like one of those “just get out of the car” moments. We’re using the car — our jobs, technology, these tall buildings and Starbucks and iPhones — to get somewhere that cars can’t reach. AI won’t save us from the problem of requiring ourselves to be productive. We’ve always had things to give us more and more free time, but then the expectations just get higher. You have all this free time, so what are you going to do with it?

Just get out of the car. That’s the first step. The first step is getting out of the car. The first step is going away somewhere, trying a completely different paradigm of existence for a while. It’s not your choice to live your existence in this car. No, in fact it’s just a ploy by Big Car to get you to use more gas.

I feel like I sound like a bumbling maniac, but this life just ain’t doing it for me. I don’t want to go to work today. I want to sit around and read books and sit outside. We’re here on earth to fart around. That’s it, that’s the end.

Alright, I’m getting to the end of my horrible tirade on the futility of existence, and my bus ride is nearly at an end. I’m going to spread out a few more words here, make this sentence far longer than it needs to be, just to get to my 1500 word limit. We’re almost there so, with that: I love you, have a good day. You’re not inferior to anyone. I’ll see you in the morning.