Journal 2025-05-04

I’m writing this, oddly enough, from the Brookwood Forest back parking lot. I have an extra 20 minutes or so until the kids’ soccer games start, so I’m sitting in my car and writing a bit. I’ve tried very hard to not kill this time with some mindless youtube-watching or scrolling, and I really just don’t feel like reading, so I’m instead going to brain dump a bunch of words out until something meaningful happens, or at least until my brain feels a little less like a solid rock.

Perhaps that’s the real usefulness of writing like this — it’s a small massage for the mind, loosening up those little knots and tensions until things quiet down and become a bit more subtle.

The more I think about this novel, the more I think about it in various different terms — I’ve been reading Jane Alison’s book Meander Spiral Explode which puts books more in terms of patterns and colors and time instead of purely in the form of plot. I was considering how this story might look — it’s probably something like a Mahler symphony, filled with these crescendos looking to break itself free, but always falling flat for some reason or another. That would be fitting. I see BZ in a bright blue, perhaps a fitting color for his characteristic blue blazer and blue jeans over a white shirt. David St. George must be red. Mark Churchill is probably navy, or perhaps he’s more like a gross mustard yellow. In the book, not necessarily in real life. (I think that last sentence should be assumed for basically everyone in the book, although I desperately need to give them new names to avoid any confusion. Future readers of my notes should really take all of this into account, if there are any of you for some ungodly reason.) And then there’s the time aspect. Undoubtedly many months will go by, and I think this whole story could go on over several years. There’s a whole potential other story that could be just, say, two days at Carnegie Hall, or two weeks on tour. But I think telling the whole story, with some people’s individual stories starting far earlier, is probably the way to go, since that’s actually how all this stuff turned out.

Anyways, I’m going to stop halfway here and head down to watch the games. Catch you later.