word is (re)born.

here in our cyclical world – not the grand-karma, circle-of-life kind so much as it is the repetitious, dulls-the-senses kind of cyclical; think spinning tires and asphalt and the dank intrusive smell of hot rubber – we are in what looks to be arm’s length of a tipping point. a new beginning, if you will. now, granted. we may have tried very hard not to notice, but by now we cannot help being at least partly aware that every weekly flip of the calendar seems to bring with it a warbling internal rhapsody about new beginnings or tipping points. on this particular monday (sounds like someone’s got a case of them!) we are nonetheless convinced that it’s a new day. for one, slowly and unavoidably i have become aware that my every serious desire to be formatively productive is a reaction to my well-worn inclination to a) party b) lay down or c) lay down and party; not only that, but my desire to hypothesize and rhapsodize about the above realization has at last at last evaporated. so. from our vantage here in the back of the café, it would seem that we have backed ourself into a corner: change closes in from every side. as recently as yesterday i’ve talked about needing a catalyst – a spark. an agent of change. but today i breathe a sigh, rub my eyes, and raise my head to see that every book on the shelf calls for revolution; every napkin on the counter begs to be frantically scribbled upon; every album in the folder promises to make our eyes wide with love. resistance is … not “futile,” exactly. but it’s been done. so let’s experiment.

lately i have been of a serious mind to seriously re-engage with the story i’m in the middle of; efforts have been stifled by my internal quibblings as to the voice and motives of the narrator. it is baffling only in the mildest sense, yet enough for me to scribble aimlessly about how i want to recast the character, a process wherein my eyes are too often narrowed and i end up using the word “theme” in every other sentence. i have never liked journal-writing, but essentially this is just what i’ve been doing: journaling on the behalf of my protagonist. one of the few things i know for sure about the character is that the idea of keeping a journal appalls him – just decide what you think and move on, already. the strength of his feeling on this matter, coupled with his page-one compulsion to begin to write his friend letters nearly every day, is part of what is supposed to give him some duplicity or depth – to make him interesting. this is all prelude. what will happen in the coming days is that every now and again hal will be given the floor; he’s got this idea that if he were to write a journal-type entry about his conception of and treatment by the author, then i would just leave it alone and finish the f’ing story already. stay tuned.

write white like me.

my old friend & professor had told me she was excited for ian mcewan's new book, saturday. this morning i saw an interview with mcewan on salon.com, so i clicked it and let my eyes scan along the lines, absent of any definite expectation. before i'd reached the bottom of page one, though, i realized: here is a guy who speaks with a trained, easy precision at the same time that he fairly reeks of perspective. heretofore, my response to author interviews was either a) reflexive disdain when i sense that there's a hole where a sense of humor should be or b) chummy excitement--partly for the warmth or intelligence of the author, but mostly for an accessibility and style of prose that clicks with me; that allows me to think practical thoughts along the lines of i am so going to do this--i am going to write loads of books and be popular, hello. but ian.m provoked a variant response, due to the almost preternatural ease with which he said things like,

"One of the privileges of writing novels is to give characters views that you have fleetingly but that are too irresponsible for you ever to defend. You can give them to a character. His [the lead protagonist in saturday] views on magical realism, I could never really ... I know there are some great novels in that vein. But still..."

i read this and laughed at the memory of trying Really Hard to like magical realism in college, but never quite getting there. then i glanced to the right end of my desk at a printout of the latest chapter of my story, wherein the narrator agrees, on a dare, to go gay for one month. huh, i said.

and, also, here's another of mcewan's parcels -

"I thought I'd have a go at challenging the notion that happiness 'writes white.' That we're drawn to forms of misery and conflict because they're easier to describe, while happiness is bland. There's supposed to be a universality to happiness while there's a distinctly individual quality about misery."

that one struck with particular acuity, since, at this particular point, writing with self-congratulatory irony requires a minimum of effort. sarcasm is a kind of muscle memory. and it's not like i am not aware of it--just yesterday, in the closing moments of the night, it struck me that how i choose to write plays into the regard with which i hold both my inside self and the outside world. so then to wake up, pour coffee and read those words even before i'd had time to settle into my niche of sarcastic awareness--it made me think.

if, in the coming days, i come across as rather unnecessarily bland or boring or needlessly glib, please do not take offense; i am practicing with dedication before breakfast-time each day. one day i shall be content and interesting. at the same time. and, while the characters i write will be the only ones allowed to hold views one might consider questionable, i've never had a particular feel for the dramatic anyway.

what doesn't kill us.

after listening to me ramble, a friend assessed that it sounds as though the job search is making me "a bit poopy." i squinted my eyes for a second and was like,

not quite -- we've passed Poopy. that was a ways back; even before we hit Frustrated. Desperate is also behind us -- was like three exits ago. we've arrived at ... not a "crossroads," exactly, but a meeting place of some kind, where Need & Clarity have intersected to grant me a Zenlike Calm. my friend just looked at me, slack-jawed and silent. which i thought was appropriate.

so i thought to repeat it when i spoke by phone to my old professor, who disagreed, calling it "frail and solipsistic;" i believe the man who overheard my phone conversation at the coffeeshop muttered something about "a grade-A clusterfuck;" while my writer-friend commented later that it "sounds more like narcissism minus the fun parts." i am impervious: their skepticism only makes me stronger. man.

I'M so EXCITED! In the WRONG PLACES!!

someone from the group of 5 really close friends i studied in england with in college sent the rest of us her new email address, and it triggered a wash of what's-going-on-with-me messages from the whole crew. when i looked in my inbox i got all excited, simply for the prospect of reading the words of my england cats. it says a lot i think when a series of group update-type emails makes me feel all tingly with warm reminiscence and love. that i care for each of them is a primary difference-maker, but also it must have to do with the fact that they all are competent writers; you know how most peops, when they email a group, are compelled to say everything with mislayed emphasis? i subscribed to an email group for my high school class, and everyone--even the multiple-phd sophisticated research types--sends these long updates that are urgent for no reason and full of yelling in the wrong places. like, my update would read along the lines of

HELLO Everybody!

It has been so long it feels like!! I'm SO SORRY NOT to have written sooner, but life has been CRAZY. Just to catch you up: Exactly one year ago yesterday, my GIRLFRIEND and LOVE OF MY LIFE and me decided TO BREAK UP!!! we each agreed that "we" had some "GROWING TO DO!"

I got off to a fast start; and proceeded to play basketball ALL DAY LONG as well as SMOKE too MUCH WEED. In retrospect, i can see that it was a pretty sad time for ME!!

Now, though, things are Much Mo Bettah :: BOTH of my contract jobs--one of which i'd hoped would turn into an IN-HOUSE WRITER position--ended EARLY. And on the SAME MONDAY!!! I was feeling quite MOPEY and sad about having NO JOB and no money and NO PROSPECTS TO SPEAK OF, but then my roommate came home and I told him about it and he just said,

"SOUNDS LIKE SOMEBODY'S GOT A CASE OF THE MONDAYS!"

..and wow, i'm tired. it takes a lot of energy just to write like that. A LOT OF ENERGY!!! anyway, in case the circumstance arises where you, the general reader, should be interested in the actual update rather than the form said update takes, the rest goes like this: i've got nearly 3 months to reach my goal of having a job i want to be having when i turn 30. and something should happen by then. i've been officially dating a girl for nearly TWO WEEKS!! probably i'm in love with her. i first met her 5 years ago. and, oh! if you read that quasi-erotica story i wrote for fatalbeauty a while back ("you are my thumb that is useful for the road") , she is the one i wrote it for and about as a going-away present when she moved to denver. she came back to finish up some credits at the uw for winter quarter, and i slowly worked my magic. which is the only way anything approximating magic has ever been worked by me. anyway she's stayed here and we're together and i like her and i have a new computer so i've started work on my story again and as soon as i pick up a new job, and a car, and a new place to live, it'll all be settled and people will stop looking so disappointed all the time.

it’s a pleasant day in purgatory.

the morning finds me at the starbucks café inside of the qfc at university village. a corporation within a corporation. i am rather unsure of what i--the consumer within the consumer--am doing there, but there i sit. sipping my coffee. gazing at the eery blankness of my calendar lends me a moment of empty content--but something catches my ear and i look up at the tv screen to see cnn headline news. the volume is up more than is strictly necessary, which is to say, at all. and i have this moment of non-recognition where it is not clear why the station exists; like, in my quasi-existential frame of mind, in this moment, i am honestly unable to pin down how anyone could go about creating an all-day news network without considering that news needs to be made all the day long or the anchors will have nothing to say. but even before it has fully expressed itself this quandary is being laid to rest, for

deborah, the commentator-announcer woman, suddenly has her screen split so as to share space with betty, the in-house exercise-expert woman, who is sitting at what looks to be the far end of the same desk (and already i am grinning for the marvelous redundancy of a split-screen shot of two people sitting next to each other). betty distinguishes herself by having her neckless business top be a decisive pink instead of deborah’s wilted mauve. she provides an almost lilting commentary for the segment on urban exercise-—something to do with the integration of brightly-colored inflatable balls, which allow your cardio-intensive exercises to be performed without your having to stand. but betty is just getting limber. looking excited now-—looking like she is ready to barrage us with helpful tips-—betty does just that, and we are off. 180 seconds from now, we will have picked up a wide variety of useful tips about walking. the first of which is: “concentrate. don’t lose focus. for most of you, this will mean not talking on your cell phone.” mmm, yes. nice. keep going, betster. and she does-—from the consternated frowny look on her face (to convey non-cellular concentration) she is on to arms: “use your arms to really get you going. don’t be willy-nilly about it,” she says as her wrists flop aimlessly about, like she’s doing an impression of the gay man she met. “really work those arms in front of you-—make a fist with your hands and punch them forward: just like hitting a nail with a hammer! hitting. punching!” she shows us how to do it, but because of the high desk she sits behind her closed fists are effectively moving straight up and down, with a sharp, piston-like economy. her arms are still pumping as her head swivels to her right, “back to you, deborah.”

a long and narrow sigh escapes my lips like i’m exhaling a stream of imaginary smoke. i do this, sometimes. usually it means that i have encountered a welcome defrocking of some misplaced seriousness or pretense. that light has been shed on some absurdity and, as a result, i feel better about my own coniferous station, my persistent cog-in-wheeldom. why is this so? why is my daily sense of myself tied so plainly to things which have nothing to with me? i don’t know. but i don’t know that i care to know; on this day, at least, betty and deborah have done a fine job of reminding that the confines of this shit i’m in are not quite so narrow and stinky as they often seem. refills, after all, are just 50 cents.