This Is Insane

Alan Jacobs, in a post saying he's done with blogging quotes the following from Buzzfeed:

This is why algorithmic time is so disorienting and why it bends your mind. Everything good, bad, and complicated flows through our phones, and for those not living some hippie Walden trip, we operate inside a technological experience that moves forward and back, and pulls you with it. Using a phone is tied up with the relentless, perpendicular feeling of living through the Trump presidency: the algorithms that are never quite with you in the moment, the imperishable supply of new Instagram stories, the scrolling through what you said six hours ago, the four new texts, the absence of texts, that text from three days ago that has warmed up your entire life, the four versions of the same news alert. You can find yourself wondering why you’re seeing this now — or knowing too well why it is so. You can feel amazing and awful — exult in and be repelled by life — in the space of seconds. The thing you must say, the thing you’ve been waiting for — it’s always there, pulling you back under again and again and again. Who can remember anything anymore?

I'm sad that Jacobs is leaving blogging. His blog is weird and wonderful, frustrating and confusing, challenging in the best sense. I want good challenges to read, to overcome, and with which to be in conversation. (I've challenged myself to stop ending sentences with prepositions in order to understand why such a rule ever existed. I get it now and agree. Challenges are good.)

Much sadder is the Buzzfeed writer's abdication of her responsibility to choose a lifestyle. She labels anyone opposed to that lifestyle as "living some hippie Walden trip." She uses "you" to mean me and loses her argument because I'm not that "you" and ain't ever going to be.

Like Alan Jacobs, I disconnected from Twitter "and the thought of going back...prompts nightmares." I walked away from Facebook wishing I could have burned it down on my way out. These are my choices as to how to live.

The Buzzfeed writer isn't "using a phone," she is choosing to be used by a phone while complaining about it. Narcissus didn't complain while being turned to a flower. Her phone is a well engineered navel but she chooses to relentlessly, hopelessly, and pitifully gaze into it, as if doing otherwise would mark her as a freak.

I say, choose to be a freak.

Screw the mainstream, the social norm, the wisdom of the crowd. Keep a paper planner, play vinyl records, walk instead of driving, leave your phone home on purpose, ignore the news out of Washington, and so on. If the culture dishes out sewage, why choose to eat it?

Instead of that question, she asks, "Who can remember anything anymore?"

I can. I remember a girl smiling at me in fifth grade because I wrote it down in solitude thirty years later. I remembered a tiny shard of that memory and the rest came back over the course of an hour of writing. I freakishly reflected on life. This was twenty-one years ago, before I had a smartphone, back when that Buzzfeed paragraph would have seemed ridiculously dystopian, impossible to believe.

The life she describes is worse than ridiculous. It's insane. It sounds horrible to this Walden hippie, to this freak. I'd rather be either of those things than the "you" she thinks we all must inevitably be.

And damn it, Alan Jacobs. Keep writing your blog.

End Of The Year

The finished book sits on the shelf beside me and will soon go back to the library. Stag's Leap a collection of Sharon Olds' sad poetry, the story of her marriage's dissolution. Why do I read such things? Why does anyone? I know the answer, but saying it doesn't do the question justice, so I raise one shoulder slightly and incline my head toward it. A half shrug. Whatever.

My reading slowed this last month and a half just as my writing did. I was distracted. A bit lost. As I get from time to time. No real damage done. Just a slow down. Fewer books read. Still, I think about what happened and why. Have I been depressed? Here comes that half shrug again. Here comes whatever.

I read a guy's thoughts that January 1 doesn't begin anything. The year begins when he decides it.

My wife, before we married, categorically denied the new day until she had slept and awakened to it. I liked that. Not the sun, but her movement set the calendar. She declared it as though there could be no denying.

Me, I stick to January 1 and to midnight. Stag's Leap is the last book I'll finish this year. I've created a new blank list for the coming year. I've copied anniversaries, birthdays, and notes to a new planner and retired 2019's planner. I like the notion of beginnings even as I'm stuck on the endings inherent in the turning to a new year. Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?

The finished book will soon return to the library where it may sit untouched for years. The new planner, mostly blank, sits on the desk, open to possibility. The old planner, its time done, the world having moved on, stands on a shelf in my office. And I type, feeling gears tumble as springs uncoil, and hands turn. I see the sun descending, the afternoon light begin to fade. I can't help but feel the year drawing to a close.

That and the steady rhythm of my heart doing whatever hearts do at a pace and according to a rhythm none of us know quite how to control.

Writing Prose Poetry Again

I've taken to writing prose poems again. It has been a while. The last few years haven't felt poetic, though I know everything can be and ought to be poetic. Comedy and tragedy, love and death, happiness and depression. It's all fodder for writing and anything fits inside a poem if done right, but that's the sticky part, doing it right. I often feel insufficient to the task. One day of not writing poetry becomes two becomes a month, a year, and I get thinking maybe I've forgotten how to do the thing at all.

This reminds me of a scene from a terrible Christmas movie The Perfect Christmas List. (It's so terrible I've watched it three years in a row. One can only watch a movie ironically so many times before having to admit liking it.) In that terrible movie, which I readily admit to liking, a woman on an ice-skating date, wobbles as though she has never been on skates. Moments later she is revealed to have been a figure skater in her youth good enough to merit a plaque at the rink. Terrible Christmas movies are renowned for inconsistencies, but this one bugged me. No one forgets their skills so thoroughly.

So it is with writing poetry. (I mean it's tough to forget how to do it, not that poetry should be anything at all like The Perfect Christmas List.) I know how to write prose poetry. I can't forget. That I haven't written much of it this year is beside the point. A year isn't time enough to develop much rust. Going back to it is as simple as lacing up the skates and glide across the page.

This afternoon before therapy, I drafted a prose poem about an imitation Arts and Crafts table in the waiting room. A week ago, I wrote two other prose poems that have proven a bit tougher to put out in the world. One is someone else's story they graciously gave me the okay to share. The other, about death, might upset the living, but maybe a little disturbance is good for the soul.

Still, after drafting, I held them back, revising for days and days. It was an odd pleasure to create something and hold onto it rather than send it into the world. Reminded me to write for myself first. Having an audience helps me become a better writer and gives another purpose to the writing, but the first purpose is just to write and that's often enough. Who needs to publish? Then again, you're reading this thing that I've published, so I may be full of crap.

I've taken to writing prose poems again. It feels good flaking off the rust, turning the gears of this machine, and cranking out the work I've built it to do.

Dying A Little

After shoveling inches of heavy, wet snow from the driveway and sidewalk, I lie down in the driveway and die a little. A light flurry falls through the grey air onto my bare face, my eyes open. I feel the cold driveway leach heat from my body. I keep careful track of how much dying I'm doing. It's a balance, dying a little, dying just the right amount. Go too far and that's it. Ask Dad. He lay down in his driveway five cold winters ago. You pushed it too far, old man. The medics couldn't bring you back. You needed the lazy finger of God, a spark of lightning. The kind of lightning that came in a snow storm three days too late. I doubt it was God, wherever the hell he was hiding. I doubt too it could have brought you back. You died too much. You were gone. Back in my driveway, I thing I know right where you are. There. Down by the street. A cigarette held lightly in your hand as you say your old line. Telling me, stand up, we've got money on you. I get up slowly. Brush myself off. You stubs out your cigarette in the street. A plow roars around the corner, a wave of snow rolling in front of it. That wave crashes down across the driveway, wipes you right away. Gone again. Gone too far. I hang the shovel in the garage. Push the button to close the door. The mouth of the driveway is plowed in. The falling snow has already dusted most of the rest. I look out there. At the assembled dead looking down at the spot where I laid down. A space left clear, black as night, a reverse angel slowly fading away.