How To Say It...
I often stay up late writing. It's something I enjoy doing, it's something I want to do, and so I do it. Last night I was up until around midnight, writing. It's not like this was a lot of writing. I was making corn chowder until about 10:45, so, after surfing around online for a little bit, it was maybe, like, 45 minutes of writing.
This morning, after I got up and wandered groggily into the front room, my wife, Jen, asked me what I had written. "Oh, you know, write-y sorta stuff." She was peeved by this response. She tried to engage me, and I put up a wall. In a certain way, I can't blame her. But, on the other hand, "write-y stuff" is about as close as I can come to explaining what it was.
It's difficult to explain my process. Sometimes writing is trance-like. That's when it gets good. You struggle and stretch, and try to get the words and thoughts to merge and come out right. Sometimes they do. Other times, you go around in circles. Writing, in some respects is like meditation. When you meditate, you try to clear your mind, and concentrate on the breath. "Thinking," you tell yourself, when you catch yourself thinking. Then you return to your breath. Wrting is like this for me. I'm not able to merge word and thought effectively if I'm thinking about the day's events or some detail of my life that I'm overlooking. When I write, thought of the outside world subsides, and my mind focuses on what it is I'm writing about. A sound, a touch or a motion startle me.
When I can't achieve this state, I'll try to get thoughts down. They're disjointed (not that my writing doesn't have a disjointed quality to it anyhow), but they allow me to return to the thoughts later, and maybe write about them. I've been carrying around a small notebook, trying to take down my thoughts or feelings when something strikes me. The images don't always come out well, but at least I have the opportunity to write down what strikes me.
Take yesterday, for example. Jen and I went to Pottery Barn to check out rugs. As an aside, I have to add this: We don't often go to Pottery Barn, and, as it turns out, their rugs are too expensive for our cat, Oscar, to shit and piss on. What we need is essentially an Ikea Catvomit special, something a bit brown-beige and thick enough to preserve the hardwood beneath it. It would be nice if the names of their catvomit specials were actually Swedeicized into something like "Katvomit" or "Katscat," so that people would know exactly what to grab.
So. Returning to yesterday. I had to go to the bathroom at some point, and when I went into the men's room, my thought was "Whoa! This men's room is not the blinding, bright-white men's room that I'm accustomed to in most stores." I wrote the thoughts down. Here they are, transcribed verbatim:
So, there you have it. I can return to that precious memory again and again and again if I want to. You see, that PB bathroom was not like other bathrooms. Go to target and tell me if they have a bathroom like that . They don't. After I took a leak, I was actually looking for a name and a pricetag on the lamp. Unfortunately, there was none.
After Jen and I left the PB, we went to pay for parking. I inserted our ticket into a machine, and the machine told me that we owed a buck. At the same time we were paying, an employee of the parking facility materialized to fix some correct-change-only attitude that the machine was putting out. I searched around for a dollar, but then the guy told me that since we hadn't been parked longer than half-an-hour, we didn't have to pay. Great! At that point, we had eight minutes to make it to our car and out of the lot before we'd be dinged. As I scrambled up the steps and in the direction of the car, I thought, "If we pay a buck, it'll be because I was writing in the Pottery Barn Bathroom." Would it have been worth it to me to pay a buck to write in the pottery barn crapper?
Yes.
This morning, after I got up and wandered groggily into the front room, my wife, Jen, asked me what I had written. "Oh, you know, write-y sorta stuff." She was peeved by this response. She tried to engage me, and I put up a wall. In a certain way, I can't blame her. But, on the other hand, "write-y stuff" is about as close as I can come to explaining what it was.
It's difficult to explain my process. Sometimes writing is trance-like. That's when it gets good. You struggle and stretch, and try to get the words and thoughts to merge and come out right. Sometimes they do. Other times, you go around in circles. Writing, in some respects is like meditation. When you meditate, you try to clear your mind, and concentrate on the breath. "Thinking," you tell yourself, when you catch yourself thinking. Then you return to your breath. Wrting is like this for me. I'm not able to merge word and thought effectively if I'm thinking about the day's events or some detail of my life that I'm overlooking. When I write, thought of the outside world subsides, and my mind focuses on what it is I'm writing about. A sound, a touch or a motion startle me.
When I can't achieve this state, I'll try to get thoughts down. They're disjointed (not that my writing doesn't have a disjointed quality to it anyhow), but they allow me to return to the thoughts later, and maybe write about them. I've been carrying around a small notebook, trying to take down my thoughts or feelings when something strikes me. The images don't always come out well, but at least I have the opportunity to write down what strikes me.
Take yesterday, for example. Jen and I went to Pottery Barn to check out rugs. As an aside, I have to add this: We don't often go to Pottery Barn, and, as it turns out, their rugs are too expensive for our cat, Oscar, to shit and piss on. What we need is essentially an Ikea Catvomit special, something a bit brown-beige and thick enough to preserve the hardwood beneath it. It would be nice if the names of their catvomit specials were actually Swedeicized into something like "Katvomit" or "Katscat," so that people would know exactly what to grab.
So. Returning to yesterday. I had to go to the bathroom at some point, and when I went into the men's room, my thought was "Whoa! This men's room is not the blinding, bright-white men's room that I'm accustomed to in most stores." I wrote the thoughts down. Here they are, transcribed verbatim:
In the Emeryville pottery barn's men's room, there is a short lamp with a peened cast-iron stand and a beige, conical shade. It make s the whole room glow in a warm, homey light. I feel at home in the men's room, as if I'm in my grandparents' living room. There is a squared-off glass vase with pinecones of various sizes. Red berries take up the spaces between pine cones, and give the potpourri a festive look. the only thing wrong with this bathroom is that there's a giant mirror above the sink which also happens to be across from the space where men stand above the sit-down toilet to urinate. there is no urinal in this men's room. Muzak pipes in. As I write this, the Pina Colada song is playing. For all the potpourri, the room still smells like the mother of all farts, unleashed no less, by a centaur or some other mythical beast.
So, there you have it. I can return to that precious memory again and again and again if I want to. You see, that PB bathroom was not like other bathrooms. Go to target and tell me if they have a bathroom like that . They don't. After I took a leak, I was actually looking for a name and a pricetag on the lamp. Unfortunately, there was none.
After Jen and I left the PB, we went to pay for parking. I inserted our ticket into a machine, and the machine told me that we owed a buck. At the same time we were paying, an employee of the parking facility materialized to fix some correct-change-only attitude that the machine was putting out. I searched around for a dollar, but then the guy told me that since we hadn't been parked longer than half-an-hour, we didn't have to pay. Great! At that point, we had eight minutes to make it to our car and out of the lot before we'd be dinged. As I scrambled up the steps and in the direction of the car, I thought, "If we pay a buck, it'll be because I was writing in the Pottery Barn Bathroom." Would it have been worth it to me to pay a buck to write in the pottery barn crapper?
Yes.
