2026-01-27 Journal Entry

I have decided to simply wake up and begin writing without thinking. I have literally woken up, put my own two feet on the floot, cracked open a Red Bull (sigh, I know) and began click-clacking my fingers. One of the things that I am primitively aware of, aware of at a level of thought and psyche unknown to myself, is that I am very much at the phase of writing in which I would like to write like someone else. My sense of a goal, insofar as one has a goal in a fairly directionless task such as this, is to have someone read this and clearly know that it’s me, to see in this text something sufficiently human and light that they it becomes obvious whose chest it was extracted from. I listened to an interview with Chuck Klosterman yesterday and he kept saying how now when he reads he keeps editing sentences in his mind, because his style is so intuitive to him that he always desires things to sound that way. Perhaps that’s the muscle I can build – “desire” in that last sentence felt off, to note.

But that is indeed a high bar. Even “very good” writers don’t quite have that kind of style, but the greats certainly do. I could pick out a Virginia Woolf or James Joyce or David Foster Wallace or Cormac McCarthy from a mile away. They are in a league of their own. Saramago too. It’s an incredible feat, really.

I don’t know what else to say, so I’m going to continue the click-clack until some words are summoned into my mind.

I’ve been writing that story Judgement Day, and what’s strange is that when I first started writing it, it felt so personal, so clearly me, and now it’s as if that narrator’s voice is not so much immediately my voice, though it certainly is mine in more dire straits, but it’s a voice I’m simply familiar with, a voice I’ve heard often enough and can make sense of, really get a grip on. Perhaps part of voice is just the collection of all of those many voices and navigating them deftly enough. How to be so self-doubting and pain-stricken and alone but still having in it a certain amount of charisma, enough charisma to try and carry the reader into an uncomfortable situation in which the reader actually believes that the narrator is right, that perhaps they actually shouldn’t leave their little hidy-hole and go out into the outside world, because it’s painful in a way I think even the less ill-stricken can understand. It’s painful to see each other, it’s overwhelming that even in such simple interactions we ask something of each other, we ask in the simplest of services (in the purchasing of a burrito a bit too close to closing) for others to see us, to rectify our existence, and most of all to never hurt us. It is the ethics in our face that if anything requires such work to put away, to push down over and over again or else to be overwhelmed by that responsibility to each other. It’s that pang of guilt and shame we get when we pass another person on the street and say nothing, when a man with no shelter or place to stay for the night asks for any help, any help at all, even the most meager of change would be of assistance to him, and we put on headphones as if to have some excuse to pretend that we didn’t hear their cries, a way to justify the sort of cosmic loneliness that we create by refusing to just listen for one moment, and how each time we do such a thing we habituate ourselves to running, habituate ourselves to a world in which we think we can be self-sufficient and how we don’t really rely on anyone else and yet here we are, late at night, hungry, and in place of community and care we put a credit card, a way to persuade the human being on the other side of the counter that they should just do as I say and not ask any questions because you don’t want to see what’s going on under here, you don’t want to know, please do not ask because it will terrify you.

And this continues on and on and on and on.