I Don't Buy It

With time to spare before my appointment I was in the car, thinking where to go, what to do for nearly an hour and a half. I'm not used to so much free time, but I know what to do with it: find someplace to read and write.

The obvious choice was a coffee shop. I needed to buy a pound of beans anyway, so I turned off the highway, crossed Erie Boulevard, and drove up Westcott toward Recess Coffee. I was wishing I'd brought my bluetooth keyboard. I don't carry my laptop to and from school and so if I wanted to write it would be with two thums on my phone or by hand. Maybe I'd finish my book instead. That thought gave me pause.

I was almost through Cait Flanders' The Year Of Less in which she describes banning shopping for one year and coming to a kind of enlightenment. I could use some enlightenment (okay, a lot) so I haven't bought anything other than groceries since last week when I began reading the book. To sit at Recess, I feel obligated to buy a cup of coffee (along with the beans), but I didn't want to break the streak. Hmmm.

Instead, I went to the library where there's nothing much to buy. Maybe late fees or photocopies. It felt good being so very enlightened, but tiring too and I dozed off reading the book. I've made it almost eighteen years without being asked to leave the library and would like to keep that streak too, so I checked out a couple books and headed out.

Driving again, I thought of going to the used record shop. Surely records aren't on my do-not-buy list! But, crossed back over Erie Boulevard, I decided maybe they should be unless I go out of town to a new shop. Forty minutes early for my appointment, I parked in the lot, parked and took out my notebook to write these thoughts.

Am I up for a shopping ban? I was ready to not buy something today and that's good enough for now. I'm typing across from the turntable on which I'm spinning an album I bought in January. Writing, listening, and not buying. Doing those three things, I wonder what I might come to understand.

Open All Night

I have at least four friends struggling at least as much as I am. Each of us has hopes for how things will be and feel that we're coming up short. We all feel the gravitational pull of depression, the whirlpool spin of anxiety. It's said that misery loves company, but I wouldn't wish any of this on my worst enemy. I wouldn't even wish it on management at my job.

Speaking of which, five colleagues said today that they don't think they can come back to the job next year. One day, five people, desperation swimming in their eyes and vibrating in their voices. I nodded and said I'm sorry. Not that it's my fault, but I know the feeling. The mood on the job is dismal and getting worse. I don't see any hope there as I prepare my jump out the side door and pull the rip cord on my chute. I'll drift to a landing. Everyone left on board will crash and burn, I'm sorry to say.

I have much higher hopes for my friends outside of the job. Tonight I finished reading Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore which is one of my favorite books this year even if it came out 2012. A paragraph near the end gives me the hope I need. It says:

There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care. All the secrets in the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight. It takes forty-one seconds to climb a ladder three stories tall. It's not easy to imagine the year 3012, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. We have new capabilities now — strange powers we're still getting used to. The mountains are a message from Aldrag the Wyrm-Father. Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in.

A lot of that doesn't make sense without reading the book, so buy it now and read it already. Even without reading every page, there's enough in that paragraph to build good hope.

To each of my friends struggling, we are immortal because of our friendship and the careful work we do running, reading, teaching, making art, raising our kids, loving our partners, cherishing our memories, or maybe even writing.

The secrets are right here before us. Yeah, I know you can see them too. The mountains, the drumlins all aligned, the Finger Lakes, the Thousand Islands, the sunset off the shore of Oswego, the path the dog takes through the neighborhood, the accumulating and then melting snow, the electronic signals connecting us across a world wide web, all of these are messages of hope.

My job is in a closed and walled ghetto, but every so often I remember that life is an open city and just reading a book is one way to wander in and invite others to join me. Come on, it's quitting time. There's plenty of light still in the sky and we're all together in this. I have the feeling, tonight at least, that we might just go on forever.

A Good Book. And yet...

I just finished a book and it was good, but I'm so glad to be done with it that I won't name it out of almost boundless respect for the author. That's not how the author would want me to feel. It's certainly not what I want to be feeling. How can a good book be something I'm so relieved to have finished? How can it have taken me so long to get through? Doesn't that mean there is something wrong with the book or with me.

Of course it doesn't.

There are times when a book just works this way. There are books that I just read this way. It isn't anything wrong with the book or with me. It's more like wearing shorts when the weather turns too cold. The shorts are perfectly comfortable otherwise but today it's just too damn cold for them. (As I write this it is seventeen degrees and I am in long pants, sweatshirt, and wool socks. Still I'm cold.) This was just one of those books.

And I know what to do when this happens: Dive into the next book. I have Diane Ackerman's One Hundred Names For Love and can't wait to begin. Well, I can wait long enough to write this short piece about reading, finishing things, starting the next, and finding that about all I need in this life are good books, strong black decaf coffee, the love of my family, and something with which to write.

Was the book I just finished a good book? Yes. Yes, it was. I'm thinking of it now and realizing the marks it has left on me. I may have gone through it so slowly because every fourth page or so moved me to write some new idea. Sometimes reading pushes me away from reading toward writing or living. That can be good. I'll know more about whether the book was good for me in a while. These things don't always come immediately.

In the meantime, I'm going to find out what Diane Ackerman has to tell me about love's one hundred names.

After Ongoingness by Sarah Mancuso

from Ongoingness: The End Of A Diary by Sarah Manguso

I meet people who consider diary keeping as virtuous as daily exercise or prayer or charity. I've tried for years, they say. I start a diary every January. Or I don't have the discipline. They imagine I have willpower or strength of character. It would be harder for me not to write it, I try to explain. It doesn't feel like (in one friend's words) a big fat piece of homework. I write the diary instead of taking exercise, performing remunerative work, or volunteering my time to the unlucky. It's a vice. (10)

As a child I tried to keep diaries and failed. Felt like a failure too. Every single time. Each attempt began with a new notebook, likely something cool or pretty. The first page scared me, but all it took was writing down the date, maybe the time and place, and I was underway. Except... There wasn't anything to say. Nothing in my life felt important enough to write down. It was all just my thoughts I knew for sure they weren't worth marring the pages of a clean book. There on the first day I was already stumped. But still I wanted to be writing.

One time I made it through a few days, maybe a couple weeks but then made the mistake of bringing the thing with me to school. Sixth grade. I wanted to carry it with me. I wanted to feel its presence all day long. I wanted someone to notice that I was keeping a diary. A journal. A book I was writing. Of course someone noticed. A boy in homeroom picked it up while I was out of the room. I came back to him reading aloud from it. Kids laughed. Not that it revealed especially embarrassing details of my life. It was all dull. That's why they laughed. Being revealed as a writer turned out to feel awful. That was the end of that diary. I can still bring to mind the red cover, those six tiny, chrome rings, the way it felt in my hand, and even the shape of my awful handwriting. I remember the store from which my brother and I had purchased them. His was blue. Mine red. I can also see that boy, my friend, and the rest of them laughing.

I gave up on that diary, but I didn't give up writing. I didn't give up on wanting to be a writer. I didn't lose the things I felt I was meant to say. I just hadn't found them yet. It took ten years to find even the first one. Ten years of continuing to write.

I do Morning Pages now and I suppose we can consider it a kind of diary. I'm just shy of 1,700 days in a row writing those. It fulfills most of the wishes I've ever had for filling pages. I don't leave it lying around in homeroom any more but neither do I worry much about the other kids laughing.

A diary (even if I call it Morning Pages) is a way to be writing, to keep track of the days, to think things through, to understand, and maybe to share with others. That last bit is tricky. Once written, the diary itself is probably worthless or nearly so if handed over to a stranger. The diary isn't a finished document and it isn't often even a draft but it can become those things. David Sedaris has done it. Dani Shapiro used her journal as a jumping off point. I need to check out Virginia Woolf's diary. And word is that Thoreau's journals are fantastic.

There comes a point in keeping a daily practice such as Morning Pages or a diary when there is no will power involved. At some point, and the point varies person to person, the decision to practice becomes so automatic it goes away. The practice itself does not grind down into routine, but the toughest part, deciding to do it, evaporates. This often coincides with someone else asking, how do you do it? and suggesting that you're amazing, but you and I know better. It's that we've been wanting to write since we can remember and have come to a point in our lives when this is what we do, this is who we are.

Then we pause for a moment, considering, and add that we came to that point so long ago it's tough to remember things being otherwise. We are writers.