Journal 2025-05-13
I feel so incredibly sluggish today. I’ve just not been getting enough sleep, I think, or perhaps poor quality sleep. Or both.
I don’t really know. I’m at one of those weird points for a little while where I’m not sure what to write about.
El Paso was covered in dust today. I remembered yesterday seeing over it a bright blue sky, and then today was just brown, the horizon just brown, the buildings just brown. Dust clouds like that feel reminiscent of a bygone era for me. It’s the Dust Bowl, 10 acres and a donkey type of thing.
I went to White Sands today. I was probably only there for an hour. I realize I’m perhaps a bit ungrateful on that front. What a miracle it is to see a place like that. It’s one of those times where I wonder what the chances are — out in the middle of this desert the sand dunes rise straight up. It’s like a little bubble of gypsum or whatever it is that sand came from. I walked barefoot over it for several hours, and now I think I’m developing some weird callous or blister under my big toe. The sand was surprisingly firm.
Anyways, I would like to write a novel. I think I just start a bit with some interesting characters, and just keep watching them. I always thought it would be nice to have a character like Salvadoran Buddha, with his wife beater and gold crucifix around his neck. He doesn’t have to say very much, but just the act of listening makes him renowned. The act of paying attention, smiling.
God I’m so fucking exhausted. I just want the next hour and a half to go by so that I can get into the hotel and take a nap. I want nothing more than to nap right now. I nearly just put my head in my hands and took a nap right here in this Starbucks. Even the music in my ears is essentially too much for me to handle, it all just feels overwhelming. I need to recover some. Take a rest day. Blah blah blah all these words coming out and they really don’t mean too much.
What sorts of people are inside of me? I have this ascetic, monastic inclination, almost to the point of becoming homeless. The part of me that wants to live so thin so that I can feel alive. It’s the part of me that wants to keep playing the game of living by not playing the game. It’s like being a societal cheater, or min-maxing playing within the rules. I was miserable for a little while to save up money, and now I get to just sort of coast on the whole thing and see how it plays out. The part of me that is ascetic with the whole “pathological lack of ambition” kind of thing sometimes, because ambition means getting hurt.
Then there’s this intellectual part of me, the part of me that just wants to know everything about the world. Some of that is pure interest, but some of that is a form of insulation, this attempt at knowing everything to become clairvoyant, to insulate oneself from the world by knowing it so deeply that you transcend it, understand its ways so thoroughly so you can always preempt it. It’s another form of being outside the world, always adopting a certain distance and only dipping in when strictly necessary. Knowledge hoarding.
There’s also the part of me that desires attention and specialness, that wants to be recognized for the things above. There’s this entitlement, this feeling that of course I should be recognized for my intellect or my experience. But of course in reality my life is probably only less interesting than the lives of others, and plus everyone’s life is interesting to themselves and all others are generally secondary, thus the argument that one is interesting enough to be worth listening to is a bit silly. It’s mostly about execution — are you actually going to write well enough as to be worth listening to? Most of what I’ll write is probably about experiences that others have had — in fact, that’s mostly the point, to write about something relatable. Fiction, perhaps less so, but certainly for essays, journals, and so on.
Anyways, as for what I want to get done in the next 25 minute or so: I want to finish and publish my The Way of Kings review, and then I really should do some fiction free-writing. This novel ain’t gonna write itself, and the ideas won’t create themselves either. But that’ll perhaps be another Morning Pages, or just a brainstorming doc.
Adios.