2025-10-22 Journal Entry

Writing this stuff every day is lovely, but it’s also funny how I forget it almost entirely by the next day. I really should be going back and reading the old ones, or even just feeding them into an AI and saying “okay so what the hell was I talking about yesterday,” because invariably at least some part of all this tut-work is something valuable. It’s just so slow and steady that I barely notice. Plus it’s so wide-ranging that I often just forget the sort of things that come out.

I wish it was easier, though, to couch this in a narrative. Or I don’t know, what do most people do? Sometimes I read DFW short stories and it feels like he just has an arbitrary character and background and then starts writing and then eventually something comes out. A kid at the pool, boom that’s “Forever Overhead,” or a guy goes to therapy and then boom that’s “Good Old Neon.” That’s almost certainly not the way it goes – I imagine GON is perhaps more centered around the inexplicability of what goes on between one’s ears – but sometimes it feels that way reading it because there’s simply so much going on, so much nuance and bits and pieces that are smashed together between these huge themes. I don’t know, I love it all and it’s hard to draw the line on which bits I would cut out. That’s how I feel about so much of DFW’s work – it feels sometimes like too much, but then what part of it would I get rid of? I think some of the short stories feel less this way, like the ones I mentioned have a restraint (for him, at least) that makes them better at toeing the line between encyclopedic and overwhelming. It’s more like fitting a very large world onto the page, instead of just dumping, say, pharmaceutical manuals at you until you give way to something enormous. I like the idea of systems novels, and perhaps especially ones more like Underworld where there’s less of this sort combinatorial explosion of data and more like large swaths of different kinds of lives, but they also feel enormous and somewhat impractical. But I do think I’m over people trying to ape previous literary figures, like all the novels that try and shove the whole thing into a single sentence for no practical reason (looking at you Ducks, Newburyport). This ain’t Ulysses, okay.

Anyways, <\rant>. What else is going on. I’ve been imagining for a few days now that I could get some THC edibles or seltzers or something and get high tonight. I still think I might, but also I feel a bit icky at the fact that it came into my mind so clearly as a desire. I think I do actually have some kind of addictive personality. I think it runs in the family, at least in so far as I see how often my uncles etc. drink (not to mention the stories of J.O. getting blasted at the Cotton Club). It’s just this unwillingness to not feel anything, I think. I really have avoided that feeling of boredom and emptiness that sits in my stomach when I stop trying to cram more things into it. It’s why I’ve been trying to stop watching YouTube as I fall asleep or why I want to read without headphones on more, because it feels like I’m always trying to have music or videos on in the background. I tried to stop doing that a while back, and it generally worked pretty well, I’d say, but also I still have this propensity to be really sedentary and just let my eyes glaze over as I watch something. I think my attention is just kinda busted still, much as I like to think otherwise, and doing things like my morning pages or reading for an hour are a way of reorienting back towards this other thing, this simple awareness of my body. It’s weird to go to the gym and not have headphones on, because all the exhaustion and tension and work feels so wild. And even to just sit here in the quiet library feels weird. I have my fingers clacking on the keyboard, the sound of someone flipping through a newspaper or the noise made by the little metal beads of the string that joins a pen to a table (that was a pretty horrible definition, but you know what chained-pens I’m talking about, like at the DMV or something).

Anyways, that’s my words for today. I sometimes feel as if I could go on for hours, but for now I’m going to stop and read some more. Pip pip, cheerio.