this morning i met a dog named embassy and now i can think of nothing but that dog name
Nap Eyes - "Mark Zuckerberg"
"& gets neglected to be replaced. Many things, like yourself,"
Hello:
The pace of these letters has been slowing a little, I really think and hope just temporarily, because I am trying to finish this fucking book. For real this time. I don't want to talk about it!!! OR DO I?
I have been trying to finish this one for years and by this point it feels like a joke, saying the same thing over and over again to all my friends and family, strangers on the street. So close! I'm so close! I'm sorry I'm such a bad friend! I will call you next week! I'm sorry! I'm just so close! But like really for real this time! Like a week away! I was so close two years ago, and then my life collapsed, and then I was so close again, and then I got a concussion, and then I got another one, and then I was so close again, and then I handed in a first draft that was half craters, and then I started to fix it, and then the world exploded, and now I am so close again, but like really for real this time. This time I can really, truly feel it coming in the air tonight, I swear to god. This time is different than the others. All I have are these terrible metaphors but it's a bodily thing, the certainty. That end-of-the-jigsaw-puzzle feeling, the acceleration, the bird's eye view. I have been standing waist-deep in the water waiting for the wave to come pick me up and now all of a sudden I can feel it moving under me, around me, for real for real for real.
Being able to see the end makes me more agitated than excited. I have been piling up projects for when it's over and then making myself sick with longing, looking over at them. So close! Every morning I walk through the garden and look wistfully over at the little weeds poking through the soil. I am growing a tray of tomato seedlings on my desk because it is the spot that gets the best light but sitting next to them creates a pull in me so strong and complicated that I might actually have to move them, just so I can think a little clearer.
It's always this bad, the process of making a long thing, but this time it's been worse. I think just because of the scale. This book is a different kind of book than I've ever written, longer and more tangled up with itself, entirely first-person, nonfiction. A different kind of publisher, a different set of expectations. It was supposed to take me about a year to write and I did write, that first year, I wrote a lot, but now when I look back at it I was really sandpapering off the top layer of fear and doubt. Now I spend most of my time going back through the thickets of notes and half-starts I thought were too silly to stick with, taking those ideas I was too freaked out and twitchy to stand behind and putting them where they belong inside the structure it's taken me this long to fill out. A long loop, just to get yourself back to the beginning. If you saw the amount of material I was working with, the degree of overlap and double-back, the sheer volume of notes and notes and notes on notes, you would be concerned about me, I guarantee it, no matter how much you know what I'm talking about. I often think about this interview I read where Nathan Fielder talked about the way they put together Nathan for You: filming hours and hours and cutting away everything but three seconds, then going back to that same place and doing it again and again until they got the thing they didn't know they needed. Inefficient, is the word. The kind one.
And that's fine. I know it's fine. But I do yearn for some consistency. Some days I spend all day in front of the computer and emerge blinking at the end of the day, 20 pages richer, feeling like time has melted down around me. These days are about two hours long and I eat a whole cucumber for lunch and send apologetic text messages to the people I love for not calling them back and mean it more than anything. Sleep feels like surrender and my longing for the real world gathers into twin aches in my chest and the top of my skull. I wake up worrying that the point of life is to be among people and not apart from them and by cloistering myself off from the world to make "art" I am actually making my own life worse, not better, and also that everyone will get fed up with my bullshit someday soon and then where will I be? And then eventually I fall asleep again, and I wake up to the cat pawing at my face, and the worry has dissolved back into my bloodstream where it spends the next day crystallizing. Rinse, repeat. It was like this before, too. Nothing's changed. Other days I only manage a half hour of actual work and spend the rest of the day beating back shallow, fluttering panic while compulsively scrubbing the windowsills or making a cake or whatever. That's the same as it always was, too. I leave the house about the same, return unchanged. How is this possible?
I am not immune to the messaging that surrounds us about productivity but I don't think it's so much about that, at least not entirely. I have just been working on this one thing for so, so, so long, and I am ready for it to be over, but it's not quite over yet. I am sick of putting my life on hold to finish it, but I also don't know what my life will be like without it. I feel hopeful and nervous that I will actually get to find out. For now I am trying to maintain a steady pace, some breathing. Be patient. More patient. The wave does come, it's coming, here it is. For real. For real.
Something longer to read:
Pets, Interiors:
Submit pictures of your pets and spaces to @apartment_poem on instagram.
Roommates / Dreams:
(None of either this week! I know it waxes and wanes but please never completely stop sending these to me, I love them so much. Submit dreams and petty gripes about the people you share space with anonymously to apartmentpoem@gmail.com)
Gentle reminder:
You don't have to go on twitter. It's not bad if you do, but you don't have to.
&&&:
Carlo's basketball corner:
Dennis Rodman's lockdown defensive performances
(Holy shit!!!!)