To Write Or Not to Write This November

I came to a difficult decision the other day, and I didn’t tell anyone about it at first.

Every November, National Novel Writing Month occurs all over the world. Writers every who choose to do so sit down every day or every other day or whenever and write a novel. They, we, have 30 days to write a 50,000-word novel. I found out about it last year, and I participated. And I won. I finshed it (56,000+) in 26 days, jotting down my progress on the white board in the kitchen for my then roommate to check.

I loved every excruciating, seemingly adrenaline-packed minute of it, and I couldn’t wait till the next time. Well, the next time is upon me, and I think I’m opting out. There is another book that’s been clawing at me and, while I mention it from time to time, I’ve pretty much ignored it.

The thing is, I officially completed the first draft about a month ago. The aforementioned former roommate of mine pointed me to the light of a two-parter (like I need the stress), and I understood. So having hit a wall where I last left off – somewhere in my mid-20s – it was a welcome conversation. I felt left off some hook I hung for myself. And I was drying. The draft, ambling along toward 272 pages as I was, had become stale. It was like a doorstop. Like that box of paper next to the desk you recycle. I hated it, and I grew sick of the details. Race, gender, sexuality, class, blah, blah, blah.

But I have to write it. So rather than trying to write another novel for NaNowriMo this year, I’ve decided to dedicate some time to hopping to my memoir. I am officially working on the second draft. It’s time to edit. Fill out. Color. Find the emotion that I tend to leave out.

My fear is to failure. To be considered something less than what I am. It’s the audience I have to ignore for now. Those voices that tell me my story’s been told. That we don’t need another goddamn memoir. That just because my upbringing wasn’t marked by abuse, I have some things to contribute. People, whether in the States or here in Australia, still remind me by their stares that I have to say these things. To remind them that there is substance in otherness.

The main character I had in mind for my 2008 NaNoWriMo project will have to stay in my head for another year. Instead, I will edit, rewrite, and edit again the pages of my memoir. It starts on page one and it begins tomorrow. Again. Promise.

Home And Some Stats

I made it back to our place in Brisbane Monday afternoon. When my head finally hit the pillow, everything from the previous three weeks rushed through my head in the ninety seconds before I fell asleep. To say I need a rest after my vacation is not telling the entire story.

Existential crisis averted…though not completely
Before I left for the States, I had concerns about whether the story of mine I want to tell was worthy of telling. I found and took to heart every reason I could find to help deem it an unworthy tale. And this usually happened in the early part of the morning while everyone slept. Not a good time for certain thoughts.

But I’m focused. And my plan involves finally writing without thinking. Writing what I know. And, most important to me, telling a story that just might be able to help if only a couple of people realize they’re not alone. I also wouldn’t mind a best seller. The conundrums of the mind.

In addition to writing, I will research agents and publishers. Despite the fact that people in the business, suggested I might want to tighten up about fifty or so of my already-written pages and shop it around. “No way,” I said to them, confident that I would bust out the book to its completion, then search. Well, about two weeks ago I changed my mind. With an un-finished manuscript, I will spend some time poking agents. Someone should know I’m working on this, whether they want it, lest someone else, with a similar story, beats me to it.

The trip
I had many great dinners with many great people. I even tasted the wonderful flavor of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. There’s little to nothing like it where alcohol is concerned. And I spent a few of the best days I’ve had with my mom ever, despite her, as she calls it, “loopiness.” I return, as well, knowing the future’s been here this whole time and that I’ve been wasting it till now. It’s time to finally start trying while being unafraid to fail.

I also went to Powell’s bookstore. It has to be one of the most magical places in the world. After meeting a friend and basketball teammate from high school at its cafe, Alia and I took to our own adventure throughout the building. A city of books, it’s dubbed. Taking up a city block, Powell’s has a few floors and rooms divided by subject and given colors as names. I perused the gay book section before heading to the Lincoln section, where I picked up two books to buy. And then I decided to look for a memoir, so I went back to the front to study the massive key that explained where everything was.

“Can I help you?” a short, slim, blond woman in her early-to-mid 40s who looked ten years older than she was interrupted my concentration.

“Yeah,” I said without turning fully around to face her because I was still somewhat in awe of the six-column key in the sky. “I’m looking for your memoirs but don’t see them up there.”

“We organize memoirs by subject matter,” she said with a tone that suggested I was the stupid one. “What’s it about?”

I suddenly forgot, because my memoir (you know, the one that’s not quite finished yet) popped into my head. I wondered where they’d put mine.

“Okay, how about a memoir by someone with her own ambiguous race issues, no father, grew up on welfare, an alcoholic mother. Oh and who’s gay?”

“Social sciences, gay studies.” She paused. “Maybe African American.” Nice. Cross-referenced.

I gave her the name of the previous author and didn’t end up buying the book. One day.

Alia and I left. I love Portland.

Some trip stats:

• Slept in six different places
• Flew six airlines
• Visited four cities
• Acquired five books
• Saw the original manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
• Saw Mariel Hemingway
• Sipped absinthe
• Ate buffalo wings! Twice!

There’s gotta be more. But for now, this is it. I’m glad I went. I’m happier I’m back.

The Solitary Writer

Aren’t we all?

They say writing is a solitary form of expression. Of course the know-it-all “they” are right. This has always been an attractive element of writing for me. And writing is expression. Because I can’t sing (though I try) or paint, writing it is.

But back when I didn’t call myself a writer, I used to think that word “solitary” described the physical act of writing. When you’re sitting alone in a room at a desk in the dark hours when it’s most quiet, bent over a keyboard, clove hanging out one side of your mouth, pounding away furiously out of fear the words will leave your head if you don’t get them out quickly enough. That’s solitude.

But it’s not the only kind.

I have almost forgotten how heavy the feeling can be when the words aren’t there. The heavy feeling of solitude follows me around when I think about where in my book I am. Or when I wanna try my hand at fiction. Laughable. “There’s this guy and he–” it’s as far as I get.

“To be born an eagle one must get accustomed to high places; to be born a writer one must learn to like privation, suffering, humiliation. Above all, one must learn to live apart. Like the sloth, the writer clings to his limb while beneath him life surges by steady, persistent, tumultuous. When ready plop! he falls into the stream and battles for life.” – Henry Miller, Nexus

I’d like to say it’s all this for me. Maybe “like to say” isn’t exactly it. I’m rarely humiliated and I can’t say I suffer. Privation, though. Yes. I like the private expanse of my head when it’s on a roll. I like narrating my reactions to people; people’s reactions to me; and just the way it is. I like putting my own head spin on what I see. Random observances take on a prose style. And I write.

The random, though, isn’t the only opportunity I take to write. I’m writing a book about my life. I’m only 34. Enough has happened, I believe, to put down on paper. That it’s about my life means I don’t have to record my current state. I save that for my journal when I write in that. I save that for the stories I tell the people I know. It’s the stuff that happened back there, though, that I force myself to conjure. To translate. And to put down.

And that is the struggle. Weaving it together to make a larger point that more than five people have a chance at getting something from.

I think about it. I think about the pattern that my past events have formed. How to write it? Sometimes I hate periods, that easy way to end a thought. What will come next? And the big period that comes at the end of a chapter — if I can bear to reach the end of a chapter. Where do I go next? This is every day, whether it’s on paper or in my head. Now it’s in the first-draft phase. But even that doesn’t seem to be enough. I keep having to remind myself that the first draft is where the crap comes out. It’s what I can mold at a later date. So I put periods on the sentences and I move on to the next one. Usually in fear. And usually in the wee hours of a weekend morning while listening to my Musicalicious playlist.

That fear, though, is starting to dissipate. It’s that voice I’ve got when I’m on a roll that I’m forcing to come out more and more. Now that’s the action. The first two pages usually, invariably, suck. But then something happens in my fingers and I feel the words coming, knowing full well, mind you, that they might suck, too. But the words seem to come out a little stronger. Faster. And I’m already thinking about the next page, while my fingers work to catch up. That’s the thing. That feeling.

I’m on page 270. Much will be cut once I reach the end of draft one. Oh the end of draft one. I can’t wait. All I have to do is get to page 271.

Memoirable Truth

Augusten Burroughs has been slayed in the December issue of Vanity Fair. Buzz Bissinger, the author of the article “Ruthless with Scissors,” takes Burroughs’ truth tactics to task, interviewing the real-life Finch family, which is at the center of Burroughs’ off-the-charts book Running With Scissors.

In it the family details numerous trips to the hospital in reaction to the alleged fabrications in the book. One family member even quit his job as a police officer out of fear he’d be identified as the little boy who took a dump under the piano. I can empathize with the people. They feel their truth was grossly distorted in order to sell books. The past they had come to know and share was, in their eyes, dragged through the odor and chaos of their messy house. That could be potentially embarrassing. Sometimes the truth is.

I was eager to read the article when I first heard about it last month. Memoirists have been under the radar of voracious readers and reticent publishers for a year now, at least publicly, and so it is with this knowledge that I write my book. I was hoping this article would shed some light on the effects on others of writing one’s own story. Wait, what was that? One’s own story.

Truth can be a bitch and perception can be worse if it doesn’t mesh with your own. My perception of the color of a sweater can differ from the person standing next to me. That has actually happened.

“It’s blue.”

“Are you blind? It’s purple.”

“No, it’s totally blue.”

Now throw memory into that and the color goes through all different iterations. Put the sweater with a particular outfit and it may very well become a different color. Maybe even in a different color family. Memory dictates experience, and I know that some of my memories differ from what others experience. Then I say go write your own book. My book about my life will have my own perception of my own memory throughout. Period. It’s unfortunate if authors go so far as to totally make shit up, such as, say, being in a foster home for eleven months and abused along with the ten other children versus being in it for only a week by myself. The former is certainly more interesting, but it would also be lying.

My roommate and I have discussed this many times, as she tells me to make up names and situations. The feelings are there; the perceptions are there. Memory is “memory” for a reason. By its nature it is forgotten and relived in a different way depending on one’s state of mind. Recalling a rainy day five years ago will evoke a feeling that might not have been shared with the person you shared the rain with. A situation might have occurred twenty-five years ago, the memory of which will have emotion and even color attached to it, and a writer will describe all of it. If the writer claims it’s true, then it is true to him or her.

To the real-life Finches I say go write your own book. Declare a “memwar.” Or better yet, sue when the book comes out in 2002. Not in the summer of 2005.

I have some fuzzy memories. That’s when I give my mom a call and we talk a little and I force her to relive things that I have no knowledge of. Even then, I won’t claim those memories as my own. I will say that my mom told me about it. Or I will describe my uncertainty about the memory, paying closer attention to the feelings surrounding it. If it’s in the final draft then it is necessary to the overall narrative and, thus, significant to me as a writer writing about my life.

That Memory Again

Last weekend I spent a lot of hours editing three fourteen-page papers of a friend who is getting a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Minnesota. They were written versions of answers to questions she will have to present orally at the end of this week. Heady shit. One of the papers was on memory.

I just so happen to have another friend pursuing her own PhD at another university who is also doing work on memory. The timing was interesting. Well, the timing was timing. It didn’t really have a point and wasn’t necessarily fated. It just was. I’m doing my own work on memory, none of which will, thankfully, see the inside of a PhD classroom.

A couple of interesting things have happened in the last month or so. First, I lost my pictures. Not all of them. Just the ones I took in my four years in New York. How, you might be asking, could such a responsible person do such an abominable thing? Well, I don’t know. I backed them up a few months ago. Actually, I put them on CDs and deleted them from my computer so I could eke out some hard drive space, so that I can avoid throwing my ancient machine across the room before I get my new one in a few months. And those CDs? I have no idea where they are.

I stared at the empty slots in my CD suitcase thing, retracing steps that didn’t exist. They didn’t exist because I had absolutely no idea where they could have gone to. I just sat there. I didn’t panic. I rarely panic. I just go into fix-it mode. (I’m working on that.) Like the time when I was at the Apple Store and the nice lady told me the contents of my hard drive were gone into some kind of oblivion, including my almost-complete master’s thesis. (A lesson to thesis writers: send it to somebody to edit. Or, in my case, just send it to your mom, because she asked for it.) I just sort of looked at the nice lady. Asked how much it would cost to replace. And left.

But in this case there was nothing to fix. Pictures are pretty much irreplaceable. So in a kind of stunned cloud, I walked to the living room and sat on the couch. And called Alia. We discussed the lost pictures and the potentially false memory that they provide. This line of reasoning was purely an offshoot of my fix-it attitude. In other words, it was ok. I have my memories. And I moved on…..and started taking a lot of pictures (in preparation for the new camera I will have soon).

The other thing isn’t really an event but more a progression. I’m well on the way to reaching the end of my book. Now, it may come in the spring, or it may very well come by the end of the year. What I know now is that I’m on page 71, which is the farthest I’ve ever gotten in any written document. The version I scrapped earlier this year ended at page 61. And my thesis was 63 pages.

So what does this have to do with memory? Such aspects in a memoir are a given. It’s all memory, right? Except I’ve finally decided to write the bloody thing in chronological order. Some may say “duh” but I do not. I played around with different forms of recognition, of relaying the ways in which I have grown, so that it can somehow be more effective.

After struggling with these forms, I said “Enough!” Which probably came out differently at the time in various forms of expletives and gutteral utterances. Chronologically is where it’s at. So keeping what I had written, I went back to the beginning, to my earliest memories, and I continued. I’m not editing my narrator. I’m just going. Even though I know three-year-olds don’t talk in full sentences, I’m writing them out. I’ll get my mommy experts to tech edit those aspects.

And I’ve been digging for memories. The night I sat down to go back to the beginning, I went in search of the piles of baby pictures I had saved on those CDs. But they were gone. It wasn’t such a tragedy, because I’ll be in California soon and I’ll get them again. But it starts with pictures. My book. It starts with a discussion of what the pictures say versus what really went on. What the pictures represent are moments in time that surround those other moments that aren’t necessarily memorable. Or at least aren’t worthy of preserving forever. It was this dichotomy I sat down to capture that night, but I had to do it without the pictures. I had to consider the feelings that go in between those memories without the proof.

And it’s a hard thing. It’s a hard thing putting that period at the end of the sentence knowing that, someday during the editing process, it will most likely be deleted. The editing process will be the hardest, most likely best part of this whole experience. So with the memory I do have, I’m typing words and reaching unprecedented page counts every day. Maybe one day I’ll fulfill this dream of mine. To be published. Go after a book contract. Write more books. I’ve got plenty of stories that just keep writing themselves.

I’m living the end of my book right now, which is a strange thing to do. At what point does today become memory? When a lesson is learned? Or when more and more pieces come together? I’m not sure yet. The end will be the hardest part to write, because I don’t know how it will turn out. I’ll pick a cut-off point. But it hasn’t happened yet. It might just be the beginning of book No. 2.

‘Rememory’ in Time

I lost my notebook. My book. I’m annoyed. I bought a new one recently and filled only three pages. That’s the good news. The bad news is that they were three good pages. I’ll just have to recreate it. Not happy. It was hard enough to get going again on the next chapter, the beginning of which is in that notebook.

When I’m blocked, I put my head down. I rub my temples furiously to try to get something to come to me. I close my eyes as tight as I can to maybe get some blood flowing faster. Hoping that some memory somewhere will tell me that it is what I should be writing about next. I’ve got them all in me. I see them in pictures. Yet to describe them in words, to put them in order the way I see them, is the challenge.

I want to relay things confusedly. Or is it that I want to relay things and they just come out confusedly? I want the back and forth to connect seamlessly. But I lose track. I stop and look at my notebook or my screen. The skin on the side of my head starts to wear down. I see colors and stars screaming behind my eyelids the way they did when I was a kid and squeezed my eyes closed for fun before going to sleep. Seamless. What is that? Life happens in order, so to tell it out of such is setting myself up for disaster. Right? Maybe.

The trick is in looking back with as wide a lens as possible. Piecing life developments together like a puzzle is hard, but there are times, like when I’m on a roll and can see the next 10 pages, when it just falls into place. The benefit of time and space materializes into a rather sweet clarity, even if the memories aren’t so sweet.

In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison employed the word “rememory” to signify the process of not only remembering but also knowing what to do with the memories once they surface. That’s one thing. It’s another to make sense out of it through writing. Because it has to become a narrative of sorts with emotion that is placed back on the memories. How do you do this? Through voice maybe. Pace. And then that lens.

Taking the memories and reaching a suitable conclusion that weaves itself seamlessly into the future. That’s what life is: a series of events viewed as one for the purpose of teaching you how to live the next day. It’s also the ability, and even willingness, to look back and see how you got to where you are.

An article in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers magazine expresses this sentiment perfectly. Sven Birkerts wrote “Then, Again: Memoir and the Work of Time.” I’ve often thought back to it during my own writing process of recalling my life. And each time, this project I set out on earlier in the year (for which I’ve been preparing for 32 years) makes more sense. He writes:

Quite suddenly, at least so it seems in retrospect, my relation to my own past changed. How can I describe it? It was as though the past, especially the events and feelings of my younger years, had taken a half-step back, had overnight, with no effort on my part, arranged itself into a perspective. No, “perspective” is not quite right, for that suggests a fixed, even static arrangement. Rather, these materials had, without losing their animation or their savor, become available to me. They were there to be looked at and handled without emotional murkiness, complicating regrets, sadness, and so on….Behind the chronological accumulation of this following that, year after year, I discerned the possibility of hidden patterns, patterns that, if unearthed and understood, would somehow explain me — my life — to myself….

A part of this is being able to maintain the kind of distance that lets you keep in touch with the moments that make up that past while understanding their functions. It’s about developing a different sort of relationship to them so they can be made sense of. Maybe it’s about not being bogged down by them, which some people can definitely be (myself included), but it’s about using them for the present and the future. It’s about rememory. Birkerts continues:

All I know is that there came a point in my life when memories and feelings were coming in loud and clear. Cause and effect had fallen into new alignment. Things fit, but not so much side by side as associatively, discontinuously. I recognized that events were not as contained as I had once thought, but were, rather, part of a complicated weave, their influence appearing and disappearing over long stretches.

I couldn’t do this, recognize patterns, until I met Elizabeth. It’s not that I couldn’t, I guess, but more so that I didn’t know I could. Or how to do it. You live every day: go to bed; wake up; think; act; be. And you do it again the next day. But year after year, you have no choice but to be able to get some space from the past and allow it to take on the role of teacher almost. It becomes this living thing that you can refer to and learn from. Like a movie that has been complete and a book that you’ve just finished that you think about every so often and say to yourself, “That’s what that part was about.”

I found that it is the juxtaposition of the now and the then that creates the quasi-spatial illusion most approximating the sensations of lived experience, of recollection merging into the ongoing business of living. Now, then. Present, past. The sine qua non of memoir: the past deepening and giving authority to the present, and the present (by virtue of being invoked) creating the necessary depth of field to see the past.

He talks about remembering the big moments and how those may not provide as much, or even anything maybe, as the in-between moments, the truths of what is already there. For me that is where the work lies. It’s not only walking the road I set out to walk on the day I was born, but also engaging in the activity of necessarily pulling truth out of the moments that make up that road.

Understanding what events, or even non-events, meant to me then and how they transformed themselves throughout my subsequent days into wholly different meanings for me today. But to write about them. To put them in a position that allows me to pull the truth from them so that I can write a story that sufficiently relays who I am today as a result of who I was yesterday. And then what it was that put me in this place. I think about it every day. All the time every day. It’s not always easy.

Like the act of getting ready to meditate (or how I see the act), it’s about working to find the energy to put yourself in the space to look back. To observe. It’s first about being in that space and then it’s about doing something with what is uncovered. Birkerts identifies a problem with our today that lends credence to why, perhaps, it is hard to look back. Hard to feel the need to look back:

…I found myself making the argument that transformed social circumstances have in many ways made it harder and harder for people to “live a life” in the sense assumed by readers of biographies of outsized individuals. Who can deny it? The rapid-fire digitizing of modern life has blurred and diminished our sense of the freestanding self. Increasingly enslaved by our electronic extensions — our tools and conveniences — we have a harder time living the kinds of lives that can be given contour and written about….For one thing, our dealings with others are at every level more complexly mediated; for another, these systems create an environment of easy and constant interaction, with the result that our self-conception is necessarily more fragmented and diluted….

Has reflection been traded for fleeting bits of stimulation in the now? Is it the fear of looking back? What makes some want to and others not? It can’t be the computer. Of course it helps in making it so we don’t have to. Because looking back takes time. A quick e-mail does not. And looking back also reveals sometimes painful realizations. But not knowing about those realizations gives them license to lie dormant in a deep layer of the subconscious. But because we don’t know about them doesn’t mean they’re not acting on us. They act in our words. They act in our actions. Just look. Pay attention. And ask questions.

So do we turn the computers off? Not necessarily. One thing I started doing outside of my control was putting my penchant for thinking (reflecting?) to different use. I looked at my past as different scenes that hold meaning for who I am today. I sought guidance to help me do this. Elizabeth, through the process of therapy, gave me a hand in stepping outside of myself and looking back with a constantly “in-training” eye to parse my past and present and make connections. It’s a constantly in-training process that doesn’t always go smoothly. And it is through this process that I have discovered my story. The way to tell my story.

The work of therapy is private, and its goals of understanding and integration are not projected into the public space of literature. They remain particular to the individual. The memoirist, by contrast, deploys many of the same energies of self-interrogation, but does so with the goal of discovering a narrative that will make sense, not just as explanation, but also as dramatization, to a would-be reader. She creates from the braiding of circumstances and reflection a story that needs to pre-understanding, offering up its own explanations and terms of interest.

I’ve wanted to write a book, a memoir, I guess, since I was twelve years old. I had a lot to tell back then already about race, sexuality, gender, and kidhood depression. But I hadn’t the “vantage,” to take Birkerts’s word. But why did I then, and do I now, want to write? It’s not only because I’m a leo and like talking about myself. (That might be a small part of it.) It’s not only about telling my story. It’s about teaching people something, perhaps, about being me looking at them looking at me.

Between twelve and twenty-nine, I didn’t know how I would do it. I was consumed with pressure to tell my story but impeded by having no way to go about it. To me then, it was just a series of stories that I would tell from my standpoint. For me that wasn’t enough. So I’d write a few pages and get mad. I’d put my pen down. I’d close the book out of frustration. And that lone paragraph would sit for a few months untouched.

I can pick up any number of my notebooks now and see various attempts at starting the telling of my story and frown at them. The difference now is the fact that I can see a string of connections. A narrative of sorts has emerged for me. As has a voice with which to tell it. We all have lived lives that have universal messages. That in itself warrants a story. And that in itself is why I write. To tell my story. To relate. To discuss.

I may reflect in therapy on an unhappy period of my adolescence, testing memories and looking for insights that will help me understand why I did what I did then. To convert this into memoiristic material, however, I need to give the reader both the unprocessed feeling of the world as I saw it then and a reflective vantage that suggests that these events made a different kind of sense over time. This is the transformation which, if done well, absolves a memoiristic reflection from the charge of self-involved navel-gazing. What makes the difference is not only the fact of reflective self-awareness, but the conversion of private into public by way of a narrative meant to compel the interest of the reader.

Memoirs are for everyone to write. To publish or not. Rememory is for everyone to engage in. I am taking my process further and turning it into a narrative representation of the days I’ve lived thus far. My future rests on what I do today with yesterday. “Now, then. Present, past.” They’re separate entities that comprise the me I’m writing about. I want my rememory present for my future. My lens, though muddy at times, is ready for use, and it can never return to the dormant state it was in for so long.

So about those three pages I lost. So be it. Those pages I wrote last week are different than what I will write in replace of them today. They will be better. Time is good for that. Rememory. Mine will be published.

The Avoidance Factor

I was in a good mood this morning, surprisingly, so I decided to treat myself to a bagel. I haven’t had one of those in a couple of weeks. I returned to my room and watched tv. Practically all day. I also watched a little bit of the movie Fiddler on the Roof.

I figured I would be able to avoid any personal racial revelations with this one. I was right. I love Tevya. The Papa! I did venture outside finally, later in the day. In an almost agoraphobic space, I meandered about the East Village and, realizing I was too early for the show I was supposed to see, decided to head to my favorite reading ground, the tea lounge. Sitting outside, smoking a clove, I began to think. This always gets me in trouble, leading me, as it is wont to do, to places I find it difficult to return from.

That ‘thing’ that happened Saturday morning is there, like a big cloud now, that I feel I can’t maneuver through. So I began to take it apart piece by piece. I didn’t get very far, though, because I tried to remember another time where a similar ‘thing’ happened, a time when I felt an overwhelming lack of history and singularity.

Immediately, I thought of it. The moment happened when I was about 25. I sitting on the back of a colleague’s pick-up truck on a lunch break at my first editing gig. I was reading Homegirls, a black feminist anthology compiled by Barbara Smith. The particular piece I was reading was about the sistren, the great-grandmothers, the grandmothers, the aunts, the sisters, the mothers.

I remember looking up and imagining all of them, sitting around telling yarns about the days of old, speaking in the language only they could understand. And for good reason. Just then, another colleague, returning from his own break, pulled up by me to engage in, what I’m sure was, a stupid conversation. His name was Daryl.

A Guy Named Vince

I was at work on Friday and ran into my friend Andrew who is also one of the editors of Canon. He asked me if I had heard about my essay. I hadn’t.

He then told me that I got second place in the essay contest! Nice! There is money involved. Nicer!

It should be out in two weeks. I asked him who got first. Vince. “Vince C.?” I asked. Vince C.

When I first got to New School, we had to endure a week of registration activities/meetings. One of them was the Liberal Studies lunch. This was where I met the other people in my cohort and got to meet Jim Miller, the chair of the department. He discussed theses. He discussed Vince.

Jim holds Vince in high regard and said that he wrote one of the best theses he had ever seen. I finally met him last semester and he’s a really nice guy. He’s in his forties and went through my program. He’s now pursuing a Ph.D. in Sociology at New School. And he’s intelligent as hell.

And I finished behind him in the contest. That’s about a guy named Vince. I’m happy. I’m happy with the outcome of the essay and I’m glad that this topic of mine will finally see the light of day. I made some decisions this past week concerning writing and “this topic” as a result of the essay being published.

I need to move on. It will always be a part of me, of course. But I can’t keep re-hashing the same shit. So I will move on. My thesis on Hedwig and the Angry Inch will be the last of these issues. My identity issues. I want to start incorporating them into a new form of writing. I’m not sure of the form yet.

But I refuse to put pressure on myself to find it until after the semester. Maybe fiction. Or playwriting. I do want to write a book. About my life so far. And this will all be a part of it. But it’s got to be fresh. I don’t want to use the same tired words. What I’ve written during the past five or so years has been the same.

And it’s lacked emotion. I actually think that the essay that got second place lacks emotion. So I will try harder. To feel what I write and then put those feelings into words. This is something I’m not very good at yet. And I want to be. But that’s for later.

I just spent the last five hours cleaning up the northwest corner of my room. I had two file cabinets that contained old files and dusty piles. The result of my winter cleaning is four bags of trash and four bags of shredded paper. Hopefully the order I achieved tonight will keep itself for a while. At least until I move. Which I really hope won’t be this May.

My lease ends at the end of April. It’s not that I love this place that much to want to stay. I just don’t want to have to deal with finding a place before the end of the semester. Even this summer. I want to relax. Or something. I haven’t made any significant progress on my thesis in a couple of days. I’ve been thinking about it some, but haven’t been staring at the screen. I met with Helen today at the Tea Lounge and we talked a little bit about our respective projects.

She spoke with Jim after class the other night and he said she just needs to write. That editing is the fun part. I have a problem in that I can’t leave a sentence I’m not happy with. I can’t put a period on crap.

So I sit there and look at it and try to think of ways to make it better. And then I think about the paragraph it’s killing and wonder if it’s in the right place. “Should this be in chapter two,” I ask myself (in my head).

In my head is where the words bounce off each other as my fingers rest dormant on the home keys. And I stare. And think. And get up. I can see this thing, this paper I’m writing. And I want to get to the next page. But if I can’t get this sentence to work then I’m stuck.

And the pressure builds up to a point where my thoughts can no longer move. “Maybe I should watch the scene again,” I say to myself (in my head). And I do. And then more thoughts come. And I can see this thing. But I can’t write it into fruition. But I must. And I will. I needed to clean this corner in my room. And I will take Jim’s advice. And just write.

At a Loss

Expression. You feel pent up? You feel fucked? I can’t get it out, that thing that is stirring inside with so much intensity that no thoughts, words, or actions are available to give it shape or meaning. I sit. I stare at my screen. I stare at the couples upon couples upon disgustingly sweet couples sipping tea who have managed to find one another in this crazy world. They stare longingly into one another’s eyes, no doubt exchanging gooey sweet-nothings…and they actually mean them. They make decisions based on mutual decisions and respect, one wanting so badly to do nothing but respect his or her partner to the fullest. The other being so aware and thankful for the other’s presence in his or her life. No one is yelling, blaming, rendered worthless. Neither is made to feel like they’re a piece of garbage. I’m pent up.

This excruciating uncertainty of my present state is making me want to write. But I can’t. I’ve got an essay to write; essays to re-write; a short story (still) to complete; writing samples to write; statements of purpose to write. And I can’t put a word down on paper. I’m listening to music, to other people’s expression. I’m watching movies — other people’s expression. But I feel it in here. I’m angry but I can’t be angry at the right thing, the one thing that has triggered this position I’m in. I want to write a fantastic articles in my words that expresses my ideas about this social space in which we live; I want to (if only I could) write slam poetry; I want to write an eloquent memoir. Too young? I haven’t done anything interesting enough in my life to warrant a memoir? Perhaps. But I still want to write it. The only thing I can do to express myself is write and it’s not happening right now. It’s just not there. And I feel angry at the Beatles.

I was in the Tea Lounge tonight, happily listening to Elvis Costello, who was coming over the speakers. Then, all of a sudden, in the middle of a song, it stopped. About this time, I looked over to my right to spot three women, one of whom could not have been over 21. They were sitting at the chess table playing themselves a little game. One of them, the one who annoyed me the most, the one who could not have been over 21, exclaimed “Yeah!” when Elvis stopped. That was obnoxious, but, as we are all allowed to feel what we want about music, I decided I wasn’t that annoyed. Ehat would soon change, because Elvis was quickly replaced by the Beatles. Now, I don’t have anything against the Beatles, per se, but I don’t necessarily like them, either. If I were given a choice between listening to the Beatles and, say, Missy Elliot, over a chicken dinner, I’d probably choose the latter. The Beatles’ wagon was something I never climbed aboard. So anyway, I was a little peeved that this is what they replaced Elvis with. And then that song came on. That song about a yellow submarine. That jolly, happy fucking song that makes people bounce in their seats while singing the lyrcis (out loud) came on. I looked over again at the girls, and, sure enough, they were bouncing. Bouncing and singing. Fucking hell. Of course they only bounced during the chorus. So what did I do every time the chorus began? I looked at them. I did this because I hated them so much. It was like driving down the 5 staring at a 10-car pile up hoping to god you don’t see a dead body (when, in fact, that’s all you want to see). I kept looking over. And I was still mad. Soon, though, they stood up and prepared to leave. I was so happy. The Beatles were still playing, although the nerds hadn’t graced the patrons with their voices in a bit. Until “All You Need Is Love” came on. All who needs is love, first of all? Second of all, they started singing. And bobbing their heads back and forth….”all you need is love, love…love is all you need.” Oh, that’s all I need. Why has it taken me so long to figure it out? Fuck love. Wondering when my next therapy appointment is? Not till Thursday. Days away. After the nerd crew left the lounge, I closed my reader and pulled out my notebook, confident in the fact that I would be able to get started on my next assignment. Should I do a character study or a general culture study or combine the two? I have no idea. And so I sat there: notebook wide open taunting me, pen in hand able only to scratch out the preliminary notes I had scrawled. Nothing. And that’s where I am. I’m just happy it’s Monday. I can escape into the cozy existence of denial I’ve staked out for myself, because Monday through Wednesday is nothing but school and work. If I don’t think about the girl and how she made me feel, I’m less sad. If I don’t allow my mind to revisit the conversations filled with tension and stress and being accused and yelled at, then I can usually go about my day relatively pain-free. If I don’t think about the last time we were together, and how nicely confusing it was that we finally managed to communicate and connect, then I can just pretend it never happened. And if I suppress my pain at not having my voicemail and e-mails of three weeks ago returned, then I can really exist in a mildly pleasant space. Naw, it doesn’t feel like shit to have been fucked like that. Not at all. Chicks? Done. As am I for the night. Maybe my ability to write will return soon. I can hope.