a journal of brief or incomplete thoughts
One of the summer prompts I received from you all was about drafts and ideas: “Write about how your essays and stories begin.”
I could write about inspiration and process, and maybe I’ll write more on that another day. But I think what I’ll do for now is simply share a series of sentences, paragraphs, stories, and chunks of words that I’ve compiled into a document that I keep on my computer desktop because they’re all so short and I don’t always know immediately what I’ll do with them, so I leave them in this document and tinker with them. Sometimes I move one of them into a new document to expand it. Some of them will stay small, some of them will become part of something bigger, and some of them will live in this document for a long time while I keep tinkering. Why? Who knows. They’re like a sourdough starters or kombucha scobies . . . except that word chunks left alone for too long don’t grow nasty and sea-creature-like. Have you ever seen a scoby left unattended for months? Words don’t have a stench, praise be.
Anyway.
By sharing this journal of brief or incomplete thoughts, I hope you see that I don’t have a singular or unified approach to my writing. It begins as ideas, dreams, stories, word play, memories. Sometimes they’re entirely made up. Sometimes they’re autobiographical. Sometimes they are some hybrid of the two. They’re always imagined and re-imagined. And oftentimes I write them down first and foremost because I think they’re funny or interesting or bizarre.
Without further ado . . . bits and pieces, fits and starts:
The way to my heart never was the ocean itself, but the thin line where water meets sky, the line that, the closer you get to it, moves further out from before, the longing after it, the longing itself.
*
The marigolds were planted only twenty minutes before the guests arrived so that the guests might immediately love the idea of the front porch’s appearance as much as the hosts wanted to be seen as loving the appearance of the idea of the front porch.
*
Dream: I am riding in a SUV with a bunch of friends down a country road. My friend Brandon is driving. We approach a wide river that cuts across the road, and even though we just watched a car ahead of us pass with no problem, the river is raging and looks deep and we are all nervous for Brandon to drive us across. He drives through it struggles a bit, we all feel the pull of the river, but we make it to the other side safely. But then we all become convinced that he didn’t do it right the first time, so he turns the SUV around and crosses the river again. This happens several times, repeating the dangerous situation over and over again in an attempt to do better, to get it right.
*
Title for an essay: Futile Arguments I’ve Abruptly Ended with Imaginary Strangers
(Sequence of very brief dialogues, such as the young person working the night shift at the hardware store explaining to me why referring to the half-inch pipe adapter as “male” is offensive.)
*
Letters and spaces and indents and tabs and line breaks and page breaks and pages and paragraphs and chapters and sections and tomes and shelves and stacks and libraries and ___.
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When Charles ran into his friend in the coffee shop and said, Good Morning, and his friend replied, I am so tired of this shitty weather, Charles looked through the window at the blue sky pocked with soft small clouds and recalled his walk to the coffee shop just a moment ago, the way the light breeze brushed against his bare arms, and the manner of lilac lingering in the air, and Charles realized then that his friend was having a different sort of day, one made of internal weather reports contrary to the softness of those clouds, but really, who wants to be disagreeable on such a fine day, so Charles simply concurred and said, Well, I certainly hope it gets better.
*
These days, whenever there is a lull and his mind drifts, more and more he finds himself remembering the snow day when the city plow shoved a pile onto the side of their cul-de-sac. His older sister and her friend next door bundled up and went to dig an igloo out of the pile. When he bundled up and went to join them, they said he was not allowed inside the igloo, he might mess it up, so he went back inside, unbundled himself, and sat near his bedroom window overlooking the cul-de-sac, watching his sister and her friend play for an hour before going to the neighbor’s house. Then he bundled up, walked outside, and stood on top of the igloo until it collapsed and he fell through the roof. For several minutes he sat inside that igloo.
*
She needed to turn left. The light was red. She entered the left turn lane and stopped behind the two cars already stopped at the light. She waited patiently for the light to turn. When the green arrow flashed on, she waited patiently. She waited the appropriate time, then gave a light honk, waited, then gave a slightly longer honk. Then, suddenly from her mouth: What are we doing here, people?! No movement. The left turn arrow turned yellow. She laid on the horn. The arrow turned red. The light to go straight was still green. She hit the gas and pulled around the stopped cars to go straight instead. She slowed down enough to see who these idiots are—to gaze, to glare, to leer at them. No driver in the car. Oh. No driver in the utility truck at the front of the line either. Oh. In front of the utility truck, a barricade of cones and signs. Lane Closed – No Left Turn. Oh, she thought, oh that makes sense. She drove on.
*
Dream: I am in a hospital. A hospital administrator is showing me a chart and trying to explain some abstract concept to me. I realize they are trying to explain it to me to prepare me for a meeting with doctors to look at a chart about myself. I sit down at this table with a big chart in the middle, three doctors sit down across from me, and they all start speaking passively and awkwardly, as if avoiding a hard conversation even though that’s what we are here to do. So I say plainly, “Is this bad news about me?” One of them says yes and starts crying. The others go to console him. But I still can’t get a straight answer out of anyone. I start wandering around the hospital with my chart, trying to figure out what room I am supposed to be in and why.
*
I received an email from an organization launching its latest campaign they had titled “Moving Forward Together.” Why does this immediately make me want to pen a manifesto titled “Staying Put Separately”?
*
And so it came to pass that her wish was granted, she turned into the thing she wanted to be, but every day she woke and had to choose again to become the thing she wanted to be, and every night she went to sleep she found she had grown one inch smaller, and she carried on in this way, daily making her choice of becoming while also slowly decreasing, until the day she made the choice to vanish into herself.
*
Practice radical acceptance with no attachment to outcome.
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Write something using the word Ruck.
What I’m currently reading AND listening to: Lucinda Williams’ Don’t Tell Anybody The Secrets I Told You (This is the first audiobook I’ve ever listened to because I wanted to hear Lucinda’s voice read it to me. No, I did not figure out how to underline my favorite sentences.)
Peace!
Andrew