2025-10-27 Journal Entry

I missed the last few days of this because it was Dad’s wedding weekend. We all went down to Rosemary Beach and celebrated for a few days, and now I’m off to Vietnam. I’m currently stuck in a flying metal box for another 10 hours, so my hope is that reading and writing will be a tiny ecopoiesis over this ungodly long flight. I want to sleep but can’t. My throat hurts – I drank a bit at the wedding and had some real nasty acid reflux, which essentially charred the back of my throat to a crisp – and the wifi is really only good enough for me to do things like writing, where I can do it async. $20 more-or-less down the drain.

My intention for spending all this time in Vietnam was to have a ton of time to write, and of course at the moment I’m not exactly sure what to write about. I’m wondering if I should pick up that story I had before again. It might actually be recoverable, honestly. I don’t really know what to do about the antagonist or how really any of it will play out, but I think it could still be interesting. Previously, I was anticipating it as being a sort of Sonny Boy-esque thing where each character was some stance towards meaninglessness, which is essentially what the show does and in my version was making me a bit too much of a cognoscente about existentialism or something – we really don’t need all that. Another thought I had was from reading a blog post I saw recently about how humans naturally try and construct narratives around their lives, and one of the results of the last twenty-or-so years was not simply that irony died and earnestness arose, but in fact all sorts of stories began to be told: irony, earnestness, but also a gothic horror at vast conspiracies in an increasingly unknowable world, and so on. Some characters are living in a tragedy, some in a comedy, some in a Cormac McCarthy novel, others in genre fiction. Or something. I don’t want to concretely construct a story around that at this point, but it’s there. I also just still like the “This World” concept of flying between all sorts of different places. It’s one thing I’m really appreciating about Cloud Atlas at the moment, which is the depth of worlds between post-apocalyptic Hawaii, dystopian Korea, present-day(-ish) America, 20th-century Belgium, etc. It feels very colorful, and I appreciate the wide range that Mitchell is able to show off here. It’s a virtuosic novel without being a sort of Underworld or Infinite Jest -like systems novel per se. It’s broad and vast. It’s spanning lifetimes instead of zooming in incredibly closely on a single lifetime. I’m still not finished with it, and some things (like the big twist that the Sonmi ascension was really planted by the corpocracy, which is the part I just finished) are not completely knocking it out of the park for me, but I suppose we’ll see how I feel later on. At the very least, I’m glad I pushed through so far, and I’m interested to see how the last bit of the novel plays out. Honestly, the middle two “lives” were probably the most interesting plot points, so I’m curious where he wants to take us for the rest of the stories.

What else. Now I’d just like to keep reading and probably finish that book this flight. I spent a good chunk of the day catching up on earlier reading, but it was mostly a lot of articles and blogs, so I want to just hunker down for three hours or so and finish up CA. Perhaps I shall – but I must burn out another hundred words or so. I always wonder (and I’m cognizant that many of my morning pages are about morning pages, which I’m unsure if that’s how they should be done, but so it goes) if I really should stop at 750 words. I feel like I could just continue writing more-or-less continuously forever. 750 feels imminently doable, largely for the reason that I can meta-rationalize about morning pages for basically a whole three pages on repeat forever. Sometimes I imagine that sitting in silence may be better, or getting myself to write for, say, six pages instead of three just to really build a muscle of writing writing writing. Perhaps I’ll come back and write some more later, but for now I’m going to finish up on CA. Peac