This quote, which I tore out of an old City Pages and which has graced my bulletin board since, mm, the late 1990s, was meant to lead off a post on the riots in London.
And then I remembered that I don’t know fuck-all what’s going on over there and should just keep my trap shut.
But the tear-out? It stands on its own.
It was so obvious I forgot to mention it: the Big Fear.
About The Unexpected Neighbor, I mean, the main reason I hesitated to tell people I knew that the book was now available at Smashwords.
And no, not whether or not they liked it. But whether they’d think less of me for this story. I mean, they could like it, but think it a trifle, and thus consider me. . . trifling.
Y’know how I mentioned a couple of posts ago that, however foolish the attempt, I nonetheless try to control what people think about me? Wasn’t kidding. Not one bit.
So here I tell people—you, my friends in New York, a friend in Wisconsin, my mom—that I wrote this book. Because I want you to know that I wrote this book. And I might even want you to read it.
Maybe.
But if nobody I know reads it, I don’t know if I’ll be more disappointed or relieved. I want you to like the story, and I think the story is likable, but I’d like you to like it quite apart from me—as in, AbsurdBeats is here and the book is there and never the twain shall meet.
Silly, I know, and embarrassingly neurotic. (Okay, so the control thing may have something to do with neurosis, as well, but it sounds so much. . . flintier to state I want to control than to say I want people to think well of me. Control, yeah, I’ll go with that.)
Anyway.
I want to get better at this, the novel-writing, and while I think The Unexpected Neighbor is a decent first book, I don’t know that I’d have published it if I thought it were my only book. I wouldn’t want this to be too big a piece of me.
It’s not me. It’s not biography, and no one in the story is me. But it came out of me and there are bits of me (and friends of mine) scattered throughout these characters. It’s not all or nothing; the twain has met.
It’s mine, but not me.
I know that. I have to trust that if anyone I know reads this, they’ll know that, too.
How they know that, well—deep breath—that’s not up to me. That’s up to them.
Or I could just hope that only strangers read it.
_____
(This is the real hat-tip to Susan Wise Bauer, but her site’s not loading; I’ll add a link when I can here’s the link.)
I always call on birthdays. And this was a big one.
No, not the president’s (tho’, since we’re here, happy birthday Mr. President); my mom’s.
She’s seventy.
That could be old, I guess, but it’s tough for me to think of her (or my dad, 73 in December) as old. They golf and take vacations and go swimming and take walks and work out and play cards and watch movies and, I dunno, do all the stuff they’ve done for the past thirty or forty years.
Maybe more slowly, but, hell, a couple of years ago they went to Costa Rica and whipped down a zip line.
Anyway, my pop got my mom a Nook for her birthday. I told her about The Unexpected Neighbor.
Which was unexpected.
I didn’t think I’d tell ’em because I thought, well, they’re not going to read this thing on their computers. Plus, there’s the link to my profile, which includes a link to this blog.
My family doesn’t know about this blog.
Now, it’s not a problem if my mom follows the link and finds this blog. When I started the blog it was VERY IMPORTANT to me that I retain my pseudonymity, but over the years I’ve loosened up a lot. (And, obviously, in posting the link to The Unexpected Neighbor I made it very easy for anyone to find out who I am.) Since I had decided that I wouldn’t say anything behind my big red cube that I wouldn’t in front of my name, traversing the distance between my given name and my absurd one isn’t that great.
Still, I like that distance.
Anyone runs a search on me, this wouldn’t be the first thing to pop up. (Although I don’t know that I’d be the first thing to pop up if I ran a search on my name: it’s not uncommon. Anyway, I don’t know, because it’s been, mmm, five years? ten? since I ran a search on my name. Some shit I don’t need to worry about.) And, to extend this, I like having that space between my teaching self and my musing/ranting self. Finally, however much I’ve given myself over to the cyber-machine, I still don’t care to make it easy for the Googleplex to connect my absurd self to the rest of my life.
So, what if my mom or pop or anyone else in my family reads my blog? Eh, I don’t know. They’d be bored by the politics and likely put off by the swearing and they might wonder about my wonderings.
I don’t know that I want them wondering about my wonderings but, really, isn’t it long past time for me to stop policing what others may think of me?
I mean, let’s be real: I’m always going to try to police what people think of me, but I’m way past knowing that others will think what they think, regardless.
That’s how it’s always been, hasn’t it? You do what you do and everyone else will do what they do and sometimes it matters more than anything and sometimes it doesn’t matter at all.
So I’ll walk the beat and then let it be.
Absurdly, of course.
______
h/t Susan Wise Bauer, for this aptly-timed post
Bombings are not rare.
Karachi, Mumbai, Kabul, Mogadishu. . . people are murdered every day by criminals and terrorists who see their fellow humans solely as means to their own bloody ends.
I don’t know why I’m particularly affected by the Norwegian killings. Do I find it easier to identify with white Europeans? Is it that this is so unexpected, as if it matters more when horrific things happen to people who live in safe places than those who are under constant threat? Is it that a bomb in that city makes me wonder about a bomb in my city? Why pay more attention to this than to what happens in Baghdad?
I don’t know why it matters more, why all those bombings and shootings don’t matter more. They all matter.
So my sympathy to all of them, all of their friends, all of their families, their communities.
This is the least we can do for each other.
_________
Credit: REUTERS/Berit Roald/Scanpix
Hot, broke, and unemployed.
Yes, once again, I hate everything.
(Tho’ it must be said that we New Yorkers don’t have it as bad as those in the middle of the country. . . .)
I am fucked. Fuckity fucked fucked fucked.
And if it’s not completely my fault, well, it’s damn sure that had I been less of an idiot, I might not be quite so fucked as I am now.
*Sigh*
Same old shit: how many times on this blog have I moaned about all that I don’t do? And what have I done as a result?
Yeah, you got it: bupkis.
I used to keep a journal, but it’s been years since I’ve bothered with one. The blog is no substitute for a journal, but certainly there were some topics which could overlap with a journal.
Methinks I need to go back to journal writing, mainly because I can repeat myself and repeat myself and repeat myself and not worry about it because nobody else is going to read it. It works as a kind of practice: go over and over and over and over and over something until that something moves, until I figure out how to move.
I’ve said previously that there was some stuff I needed to work through, but just thinking about it hasn’t been enough. I need to write this shit out.
You, however, don’t need to read it all. I might get all meta on you and report on this process, but, for your sake and mine, I’ll stop me since you’ve heard this all before.
Betwixt and between, once again.
My second summer session course was cancelled, which is officially Very Bad News: I need the money. But I’m also unofficially fine with this (even though I need the money).
I don’t understand my moods. Okay, yes, I get the anxiety about money and the omnipresent dread of my own existence blah blah, but calmness amidst this apparent calamity? Dunna understand, at all.
Perhaps the calm is due to some clearing out of things in my apartment, trying to create more space in my space, and the general satisfaction of wanting to change something and actually being able to do so.
Perhaps it’s knowing that I can earn some of that necessary money through Mechanical Turk. No, it’s not a career and nothing I’d want to do long-term, but it’s an alternative to sitting on my ass waiting for someone to call for an interview.
Perhaps it’s that I had a few things on my mind which have been sorted, at least for the time being. Instead of that head-space being invaded by the always-voracious anxiety, in this instance it’s simply allowed me to breathe.
Perhaps it’s because I’ve started writing—really writing—again. I think that bike ride with C. I mentioned a few posts ago really did signal a shift, which is a hell of a pleasant surprise.
Or perhaps I’m simply in massive denial, and once this delusion fades I’ll be filled with all my usual vexations and perplexations. Could be; probably.
But in the meantime I’m going to go with this.
Y’all know my general “fuck you/pay me” approach to, well, everything I don’t want to do which I don’t have to do, as well as to everything someone else wants from me which would profit him or her.
Nothing personal, but if you’re not a friend or charity or some other worthy civic organization, if you want something other than courtesy from me, you have to pay me.
(This general sensibility is not-unconnected to my “brand loyalty is for suckers” axiom, as well as to my disinclination to pay for merchandise which exists pretty much just as a brand, i.e., I won’t pay you to advertise your product.)
I still hold to all of that, even as I am quite happy to announce that I will be performing work for free for an institution which doesn’t fit any of my above exceptions.
I’m a-gonna be a Gallup household. More officially, I have been invited “to join our exclusive public opinion Panel of American households.”
Fuck yeah!
I don’t know why I’m so psyched about this. I long ago stopped answering most corporate surveys, and I’m one of those folk who, instead of writing a letter of complaint to the corporation behind a faulty product I purchased, simply bought something else the next time around. Why should I do your [customer service] work for you, I thought, and for free? But I am totally going to do Gallup’s work.
Maybe it’s because I’ve used Gallup polls in my own work, maybe it’s the fact that they do have a long and well-known history in polling, but, honestly, I’m psyched to think that someone as odd as me, with opinions as marginal as mine, is going to represent a data point on results “used to inform businesses, media, and government about Americans’ opinions and preferences.”
Okay, so I might end up in the error bin or disregarded as an outlier, but, y’know, if there are other odd folk with marginal opinions in Gallupland, we might be strong enough at least to be a blip on the opinion radar.
Can’t wait for that first survey.
I am so tired of being a loser.
C. and I were at the end of our leisurely Red Hook/Gowanus ride and finishing our equally leisurely conversation in—yes—a leisurely manner. We had been discussing her novel* and her job and taking classes and the trail detoured into my life.
Which is when I burst out the above statement, along with complaints about being an underachieving dilettante and not extending myself or diving into anything which would pull something out of me or committing myself, really, to anything.
And it’s so goddamned irritating, I ranted, that I make the same diagnosis over and over and over and still, here I am, grumpy and underachieving and uncommitted.
No, I’m not going to continue the rant, here; besides, you’ve heard it all before: I was stuck for twenty years between suicide and living and now I’m stuck in the not-knowing of living blah blah.
C. suggested that I just get out there and try different things, volunteer, anything to get myself moving and maybe, just maybe, involved. Sound advice, certainly, and nothing I haven’t told myself in previous go-arounds.
But it did occur to me, after we finally split, that I’ve got a real issue with trying to hoard time, so much so it interferes with the just-get-out-there approach: I don’t want to commit because what if I can’t follow through? I don’t want to be inconstant, so better not to be anything at all. What if I run out of time?
Nonsense, I know, at least in prosaic terms. I live in time and can no more grab hold of it than a fish can water. I can control my movements in time, but time itself? Nuh-uh.
Whether I can do anything with this elementary law of physics remains to be seen.
And there’s a flip side: Even as I am a physics-al being, I also know what it likes to live absent time. I’m not talking here of being ‘in the moment’ (although that’s nice when it happens, rare tho’ it is), but when I’m so involved in an activity that I have no consciousness of time.
Which brings me back to the beginning, and writing. C. mentioned that I seemed to be in a fictional frame of mind (oh, the meanings in that observation. . !), and I mentioned a story I had been turning over. I have characters, I said, but not much beyond that; I need to let this sit a bit, see what happens.
But then I noted that in between novel 1 and 2, I started another story, one which I might never get back to, and maybe this story is like that one: the one which prepares me for the next one.
And right then, I thought, Well, I’m not a loser dilettante when I’m writing; I just write.
Thus, that leisurely bike ride and leisurely conversation popped something loose: Start writing again, and the writing will come. Sketching out that story for C. helped me to see that that’s maybe all it will ever be, and that’s okay. Commit to the writing itself, just, just remember that I can commit to the work itself.
Something else will come; something else always comes.
~~~
*Hey, C. it occurred to me that you could work the slingshot into a joke: Your narrator could pick up a slingshot or having someone hand one to her and she could demur, muttering “Too Clan-of-the-Cave Bear.”
Anyway.
AbsurdBeats 