2/9/2024

Liveblogging Friday February 9th

10:43 am

Took my sweet time ambling about the house this morning, after what seemed a very fast week in which I got not much done. Still trying to orient myself to coming out the other side of all the work and energy depletion from book promotion, I guess. Have been feeling calmer and more resilient mostly, but also having a bit of trouble figuring out what I want/need to focus on. Trying to enjoy what feels like a down period between stations, but really my productivity engine hates feeling like the days get past me w/o proof.

Have been having really long, involved dreams almost every night now. When I wake up it usually feels like I’ve been stuck in another, static universe throughout the entire time I’ve been asleep, a vast difference from the long period of not remembering any dreams from like last October through most of January. I’ve been cutting back on cannabis and trying to remind myself before I go to sleep that I want to remember my sleep experience, and that has been working. It occurred to me at one point that it felt like I was living out an extended dreamlife adaptation of Mann’s The Magic Mountain—likely from the common thread throughout all the dreams of feeling like I was stranded in some kind of massive complex, surrounded by old friends and acquaintances in a maze of rooms that keep recasting themselves. Also a feeling of needing to escape; that something is coming after all of us to destroy us and everything we have. My emotional temperature inside the dreams is all quite level, though, despite the high conceptual anxiety. I feel more logical and resourceful than I often have in similar dreams, which I suppose shows some unconscious kind of progress since last fall.

Googling ‘magic mountain adaptation’ reveals there was a German production in 1982. Also found one Youtube thumbnail for a 1987 version that appears to be in English but there’s no other info about it besides this video of some guy giving a lecture about it. Looks like Robin Williams is in it? This seems wrong but I will believe it. There should be more movies that are talked about and studied as if they exist but that don’t actually exist besides ephemera.

It’s really quiet here today. BTC is running. Don’t really feel like working but going to try working on my novel manuscript.

11:06 am

A few authors I think are very overrated:

Denis Johnson
Joan Didion
Nabokov
Helene Cixous

Tempted to include several living, working writers who are earlier in their careers but that’s not a good idea.

Got up to go randomly clean my toilet bowl while thinking about this. I’ve gotten so while I am writing lately I write 1-5 words and then get up and find some way to distract myself while thinking about which of the words I want to change and what I could add after that. I used to be a ‘write 2000-8000 words everyday’ person and now I’m more like ‘write 200-500 words 4-6 days a week’ person. Word count is probably the worst possible way to gauge your progress, especially if you’re not trying to spend the next 2-3 years after you finish a draft revising and rerevising it—who knew?

Thinking about all the ppl at AWP right now and how next year they should do nametags that show ‘Current Word Count of My Work-in-Progress’ instead of people’s names. Can’t imagine wanting to be in a warehouse full of authors. Probably because I don’t really drink anymore.

11:57 am

Thought of another author I suppose I don’t like: Sylvia Plath. Not because her writing is bad (I honestly haven’t read much of it). But because how now she’s the only thing people can think about when they think about suicided female poet. Honestly, how demoralizing is it that you have to reduce a person’s life to the nearest possible model you can use to diminutize the truth of the complexity of a mind? It screams to me, “I don’t want to actually think about what happened.” Alongside, re: my own attempt to tell what happened, as essentially the only one who was there beside her through those last years, while continuously conceding that my story is only mine and naturally full of holes: “I don’t believe you.”

Megan explained to me last night, amidst a longer talk about her frustrations about the reviews of my book, how people are latching on to my mentioning the DSM because of the stigma that surrounds mental health, especially for women. How using a tag like ‘borderline personality’ automatically categorizes them in a specific way that makes them less real and more easily conceived as a product of mental dysfunction, when in truth mental health is a continuum. It’s also a product of people using their diagnoses as a kind of personality trait, to gain some kind cache or edge around the idea that they struggle, or that they are unique. Molly fits none of that, and never could have through the eyes of anyone who actually knew her. In fact, I remember her saying she thought Plath was a spoiled idiot, snorting about it. It’s been really bizarre to see people conflating my writing with our lives in this way, trying to force us each to reckon with these hazy prototypes that in actuality share so little similarity with our reality that it’s essentially insulting to have to swallow.

In general, I think most people, especially younger people, just don’t have the ability to comprehend what losing your spouse feels like or what it does to you, much less even a marriage, and all the complexities that emerge and resign and mutate over time. I’m getting better at sitting back and letting people have their thoughts, but I also can’t help but wonder how to balance the belief that an artist should be writing from their soul, reckoning with fear, rather than baiting an audience’s understanding, alongside the desire to be understood, felt, heard.

Keep wanting to tweet “dressing up as Ted Hughes for Halloween this year” or something like that. I don’t know the first thing about Ted Hughes and his writing but from what I’ve learned about how he handled Plath’s estate, he seems like a fuck. Thanks for comparing me—a person who had no choice in Molly’s ending her life, who has done everything since then to try to preserve her work and memory, not to mention simply trying to survive and recover my own life—to such a fuck. I know I have a penis, but maybe imagine I’m also a person.

12:53 pm

Stumbled onto this list of all the shows I played in 2001-2003 with Cynosure, a metallic hardcore band I was in during college. I miss these days. Strange how I never would have thought of most of these events again if I hadn’t kept the list.

Vividly remember the pg. 99 / Majority Rule show tho. A very tiny room under a bookstore, so full of bodies no one could stand up without pressing against everybody else, the bands right there on the floor in front of us. Feel like starting some kind of weird noise band just for the fun of that again.

Also stands out to me that we only had 2 shows before one of our bandmates got killed, Jefferey Patterson—shot in the face while stopping at a payphone outside a Caribou Coffee in downtown Atlanta, on his way to drop off skate equipment to a friend. More than any show, I remember the experience of all of us in the band experiencing death so close up, and trying to figure out whether to / how to continue on without him. Gathering outside the hospital while he was on life support so people could come say goodbye. Playing tapes of him talking to himself in an audio journal at the memorial show; how he was as excited for life as he had ever been at that time.

Remembering Jeff wearing nails in his ears. Throwing himself around so hard at practice that he bashed his head into a metal pipe and had to stop. Really sweet, thoughtful guy, dead at 20. His favorite band was In/Humanity.

1:27 pm

So far I have deleted 1 word from my novel today, and written nothing.

Yesterday I put on a recording of a heartbeat to try to use it to inspire some direction through a very strange spot in the manuscript, one I find it hard to even explain what I am trying to do or what it would look like to succeed. I found the audio made it all but impossible to think, as each beat seemed to bump my brain and then leave no time after before it hits again. I like thinking of a heartbeat as an eraser for my thoughts. Have been listening to it again today and then turning it off to see if anything comes out but it just doesn’t seem there. Not quite like ‘writer’s block’ but more so a sort of reshuffling that must occur before I can proceed from where I was.

Giving myself 30 more minutes before I pack it in and maybe go to the gym instead.

2:53 pm

Beavis is patiently but suggestively waiting for me to stop fiddling with a paragraph and take him to dump out.

3:15 pm

Have developed a decent headache. Going for a run outside.

4:57 pm

Finished running. Also went to Rite-Aid to get dishwasher pods, deodorant, and a prescription, but the prescription wasn’t fillable yet. Cashier continued reading her phone with one hand while ringing my stuff up with the other.

Thinking about driving to the Horseshoe so I can put in some Super Bowl bets, but might just bet some props online instead. Public too high on Chiefs as a dog gives me caution but I don’t want to bet against Mahomes in favor of Purdy, despite the 49ers being the better team in most every other way besides coaching and experience. Experience is usually worth the most of anything in these games. Plus Shanahan loves to blow things by playing it safe. Probably will bet a little on Chiefs ML for fun.

Otherwise I like:

Mahomes rushing attempts over 4.5
McCaffrey rushing yards over 89.5
McCaffrey receiving yards over 33.5
Deebo receiving yards over 58.5
Purdy passing attempts under 31.5
Game total under 47.5

I don’t really talk much about my gambling/crypto interests online, or anywhere really besides to Megan when feel like babbling, but I’ve spent a lot of time on both over the years. I guess it’s nice to feel like there’s a part of the world I explore without any conversation at all with regular people in my life. Mostly though I just know most people I already interact with don’t want to hear it, or don’t care or understand, and I don’t feel like making new friends. Life is private/isolated in that way for me and has been for so long that it doesn’t bother me. In a way it makes time feel more elastic.

5:30 pm

Going outside to wait for Megan to get home from work any minute now so I can chase her car up the street and dance in celebration for her return and some great news she got today. Tonight we will party in our living room.

6:52 pm

We ordered Thai food and are watching Meet the Parents casually while doing stuff on devices.

7:57 pm

Feel out of it, but in a good way. Peaceful-like.

Thought, “If I had an unlimited budget to remake any movie it’d be A Clockwork Orange.” Didn’t bother considering any other movies even for a second, like it’s a line in a script someone wrote for how my day was going to be today. Was trying to write earlier in a meta fashion about something like that. The writer character in A Clockwork Orange suffers greatly. Seems funny Burgess hated the film. What did he want it to look like?

It’s weird how believing in God or not, and how they believe if they do, is such a contentious thing for so many people. Reminds me of David Cross saying every time he thinks of George W. Bush saying, “The terrorists hate our freedom,” he thinks of the TV show The Simple Life. “You know what? I hate our freedom. This is all we’ve done with it?”

I’m working on learning to be more chill, and to actually chill.

I’m upstairs in my office typing this but in a second I’m going to back downstairs and watch the end of the Greg Focker story.

I wonder what Ben Stiller was doing on 9/11/2001. Was telling Megan a story earlier about the time I saw Ben Stiller at MJQ (a dance club in Atlanta) and how he was dancing very strangely in an empty room with two women, all of them acting really intense and overly sexy about it. Megan said they were probably on drugs. I also remembered that’s the first night I met Thomas Morton, after Gian told us to hang on. Thomas and I were from the same small suburb, it turns out. Ended up wasted in the Taco Bell drive-thru instead of going to another bar with him like I was supposed to. Sometimes I miss drinking because of the cutting loose-ness of it, but anytime I’ve tried to have a few just for fun lately I end up feeling like I want to puke halfway through the first drink. This is almost the end of my paragraph that began with wondering where Stiller was when the planes hit. And I wonder what he was wearing. And what he ate that day. I wonder if he cried. I wonder what he’d say if someone asked if he thinks about where he was on 9/11 very often, and if not, why?

8:20 pm

While trying to describe my recurring dreams from this morning to Megan (who always wants to know as much about dreams as possible in the most lovely way), I found myself comparing the architecture of the dream (which is more vivid to me than the plot) to Peter Tscherkassky’s short film Outer Space (which I also like to use when I teach affective writing)—how sometimes the dream seems normal and everyday but also boxed in oddly, and then sometimes you understand time in the dream like it is rhizomatic, and you are moved around through different illuminated coordinates, going through scenes or having emotional reactions to things, or witnessing oblong POVs of the same scene suddenly; all of it decentralized and kind of runny, but still oddly realistic and engaging when you are able to find windows that elongate. I’ve been having that same dream for like 3-4 weeks at this point, and I can never remember much of it spatially, but I feel like I could describe the architecture for the length of an entire novel. This is why I wonder how people don’t know what to do in fiction beyond the real. Outer Space may be the perfect film, to me.

8:37 pm

Told Megan that sharing my Super Bowl picks on my Substack felt like showing my dick as we discussed the intracacies of our individual liveblogging experiences today.

8:42 pm

Watched American Fiction preview. Oh shit. We are watching this tonight.

I can’t quite ascertain what my feelings tell me about BLP Kosher’s music.

Said, “I wish I would be so fat I wouldn’t be alive” aloud without thinking in the same mode as the A Clockwork Orange thought before pressing play on Da Ali G Show “Human Rights” roundtable video.

12:32 am

Watched American Fiction. Solid. Then we watched some videos of this gas station attendant who says weird things to his customers. Megan fell asleep. Today was strange. Somehow I don’t think anything would have happened if I hadn’t been writing it down.