End of a long week (it’s a Monday)
- 5 minsA whole host of my problems can be solved by putting some pen to paper.
I think the worst feeling is when you can’t find the words to describe what you feel. That feeling seems to consume me most days. I lose myself in songs those days.
I’d like to start more days without that feeling. I’d like to start more days feeling brighter. Ritual is our relationships with our selves. The ritual of lighting a cigarette becomes a relationship with yourself. The ritual of holding a cup of tea in your hands, swallowing back a cough, and hacking out some mucus. Listening to a song.
I think if there are few rituals I like in my life, it’s ones where I sit with myself. I usually find that I am in a pretty cool place to sit in. That is by choice. I am a cool person, and I choose cool people to sit with.
I knew people like that. People who constantly reaffirmed how cool things were. (Specifically my 9th grade woodshop teacher. Cancer survivor. Wonderful woman. A little too cheery for my mood at 8 in the morning). The universe seemed so loosely held together to them, that they were terrified without their words of praise it’d all fall apart. What’s tragic about that kind of self-importance is that it makes the world seem so much scarier than it really is.
Particularly because the world’s rather indifferent. If you look for things to be afraid of you’ll find it.
There is no prize for living a life alone, no matter how many people envy it or how many people you could invite to a party. It’s still yours to live. Really all there is this chattering old skull in an empty room filling it up with things to keep it occupied (what I imagine my mind’s voice looks like). Perhaps it finds another chattering old skull to talk to. You’re just this mind talking to itself and keeping itself busy.
I had a great walk today. Went for a stroll through this park, and then sat at a bench and watched the sunset. I listened to “Kind of Blue” by Miles Davis. I listened to some classical music that reminded me of my mom. I listened to some bedroom pop that reminded me of a friend from the 10th grade. He’s doing study abroad in London now. Hope he’s doing well. I texted my friend in the Bay to see how he’s doing. He’s in a relationship now. Seems to be doing well, but it’s hard to talk to him about some things.
I think what sucks about Goodbyes is that what you are saying Goodbye to is something that has been a source of lightness and warmth, yet Goodbyes are these awful things. I want to be able to mourn and honor the lightness of that thing, without carrying a heavy grief.
I am incredibly grateful for being put in music and dance lessons when I was younger, because of how much I lean on them as metaphors to understand so many things in the world. I think if I’m good at one thing (which isn’t how I’d think about it) it’s stringing words together in ways to bring people. Projecting those words to the right people and in the right ways. And then finding some time to play in the free time. This constant push and pull of “putting pen to paper” and “playing.” Apollonian and Dionysian, as Nietzsche would put it. I’m rereading The Birth of the Tragedy. A little self-important, but fun to read though! He’s one of those writers that you just read pages of, and have no clue what’s happening, and then when you finish you notice that something has been unsettled. Something has stirred.
I think that “partying,” broadly speaking, makes “putting pen to paper” seem distinctly more difficult than it needs to be. In high school (and it still is) my favorite pastime was noodling aimlessly on my guitar. Yet the “partier” in me, the guy who seems to “take it easy,” struggles to find the time.
The more deeply I’ve learnt to love Play, the more deeply I’ve learnt to love Putting pen to paper.
As you can probably glean from all this, I’m reading far too much David Foster Wallace than is good for me. I kid, but I think there’s some truth that DFW’s kinda self-aware, self-critiquing, drawling sense of humor had it in for him. RIP.
I love the way he strung words together though. Him and DeLillo and Sorkin and every other writer that drives me nuts.
They all take themselves seriously in such recursive manners. So obsessed with their own literature that their sentences never end. It reminds me of conversations Amma would have with me in front of textbooks, that’d have animals on them, but were still about computers. Recursion.
ChatGPT seems to be my most literate friend these days, but all I seem to ever use it for is to outsource my anxiety. “Help me write this email asking for a favor, but don’t be too pushy, but still ask for that favor.” My days are just a coming and going of Bluetooth connections as I thumb for the right playlist.
I think about this one author, Douglas Hofstadter, who—frankly—I never read. I’ve read up to the third chapter of his magnum opus, Godel, Escher, & Bach, and then gave it to my mother who planted it on her bedside bookshelf, whom I’m sure hasn’t read it either. The man, so I’m told since I actually haven’t finished any one of his books, became deeply interested in strange loops, particularly after his wife passed. I find that kind of thing tragic. Words are dangerous in that regard because they can eat you if you let them. Grad students and playlist curators beware.
But they know that. I don’t have to tell them. Earnest people’s punishment and reward for their earnestness is their own earnestness. That’s why they put pen to paper.