March 21, 2020
I’ve sat down to work. The morning has begun. Three hours have passed since I woke, made breakfast, and handled F.
Last night (nights are evening, now), I walked and snapped pictures.
I have an addiction: I watched fourteen drag race vids on CarWowCar last night while cleaning the kitchen scared of my unoccupied mind.
Have you read the scene in Infinite Jest where an addict sits on a couch waiting for his weed?
Once the woman who said she’d come had come, he would shut the whole system down. It occurred to him that he would disappear into a hole in a girder inside him that supported something else inside him. He was unsure what the thing inside him was and was unprepared to commit himself to the course of action that would be required to explore the question.
What is so unbearable about ourselves? To slip out in a canoe on a still lake, a calm morning, paralyzed by fear of what is invisible beneath. That it’s only stocked trout makes no difference. We try to drown our fear wherever it’s most convenient.
Terror is the momentum beneath most of Wallace’s prose.
At the end now, an imaginary end as I have not yet completed this essay-memoir. Have you heard of the Sedona Method? A sentence is a stone I have gathered, held, and dropped again. My book a mountain of these stones. Is this a cairn? Am I dead? An old man? (People call me Old Man M—, I realize, because I always speak in the past tense).
Reading an article in the London Review of Books (LRB) about Larkin. A biographical account; an epistolary foundation. I could have lived his life and I don’t mean the success. I could have had the mean, callow loneliness; the attachment to frustrating parents and a refusal to find a home.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal
Shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids
Yourself.
Despite the evidence, I believed that if you could produce great art, whatever insight, intelligence, wit or subtlety, hard sentimentalism or just the recognition of the ugly beauty bearing down on all of us, you would have the insight to create a happy, at least, peaceful life for yourself. I believed that one had to have achieved the latter to produce the former.
Like any truth, this had everything to do with me: I could not ignore what had happened to me. I could do nothing until I dealt with it, so I followed a path towards happiness believing it would lead me to success. I only found an ability to know love. As common and supposedly natural, I had to work hard for this. Now, at least, I count it as an accomplishment alongside what I would have considered real success.
