On Writing

Writing is not fun. Falling in love is fun. Or sitting on the beach in Santorini. Or eating an 8-course meal at Bazaar. Or spending an evening at the Bowl. Reading is fun. Dinner with friends is fun. Flea Markets are fun. Lazy Sunday afternoons are fun. Winning anything is fun, whether it's a $10 raffle or the affections of someone you're into or an argument with someone you don't particularly like. Weddings can be fun if you like the people getting married and generally enjoy big parties with cake. Writing is sort of a miserable activity. You do it to maintain your sanity, to parse out what's important to you, to negotiate your reality. You do it so this churning volatility within you has someplace to go. You do it so you don't sink. Like meditation, it has to be a daily practice. Maybe even like medication. Some days, I think I can manage without writing. I'm in a good place, I can go off these meds. But you can't, because you find yourself right back where you started. Back into old habits, old patterns, old ways of thinking. Your emotional pathways (I imagine these as mini interstate capillaries criss-crossing my body) start to atrophy and the will to try something a different way, the will to grow dies.

* * *

Late Summer/Early fall is the worst time of the year. For 18 years of my life, this was the time we'd return from India, and I'd head back to whatever school I was attending then, knowing that I'd spend the next nine months jumping through hoops like a well-trained circus animal. I was good at this and I did it by rote, memorized vocab words calculated the surface area of rotating spheres sliced off 6-inch columns in Times New Roman typeset about school bake sales with an exacto blade to paste onto white card that would be sent to a printer to be printed and distributed as a newspaper that people would use to mop up cranberry juice spills in the student center. I was earnest and sad and lost and yet still doing, but uncertain of where the cards would eventually fall after all of this was over. By the end of it, there was no resistance left in me. I was a teenage lab rat in an experiment on learned helplessness.

This is the time of year that I feel it again. Like the smoke from the wildfires is slowly suffocating me and I wake up in the mornings unable to breathe and unable to change. This is my own seasonal despair. Some people tell me they feel it in February. Others say that early Spring is the worst. For me, the acknowledgement of the limits of my life resurfaces annually, right about now. And I respond to it like the trained lab rat who has given up. Who can't find a new road or has simply decided it's too hard. I'm not as enterprising or as ambitious as I once thought I would eventually be.

* * *
Women close the spaces between them through acts of confession. They whisper secrets to one another and in this way become friends. Confession is about letting someone access your secrets, but there's also an exclusionary aspect to it. "He said this," "She did that," and you and I are friends. You and I are not them. You and I are us. With some people, no matter how much you confess and no matter how much they confess, the space can't be bridged. There's still a palpable distance. And in this space, some sort of tension, some sort of resentment builds. We don't like being kept at arm's length by anyone. "Why does this happen?" I ask him. Why is there space between her and I? Why can't we bridge it? And why does it make me mistrustful of her?"

I know that feeling, he says. Some people seek closeness, but they can't seem to land it. They are always afloat at sea, unable to dock their boats. You shouldn't be resentful, she can't help it. There's something claustrophobic about emotional closeness for some people, he says. They seek it and when they see it in the distance, closing in on them, they decide to hedge their bets and stay afloat. They can see you in the distance, and that's enough.

That's not enough for me, I say.

I know, he says. You're not built like that. You're the boat that needs to come home to a dock, he says.

I guess I am.

* * *

Last night was the Atwater Village street fair. What I liked about this event was that it was one of those things shodilly thrown together with little skill and lots of raw enthusiasm. It was refreshing. Sheen and composition are overrated anyway. And I liked walking down the street in my flip flops with a plastic cup of sangria in my hand, being offered mini Napoleans and organic dog biscuits for my non-existent dog and T-shirts with hipster-designed owls on them. It reminded me of college, the raw cheer and goodwill of it all. People talking to their neighbors about where to get the best Vietnamese food, storekeepers asking pregnant women when they're due, women asking other women where they bought their earrings, flamenco dancers giving a demonstration on the sidewalk. It was night and the air smelled of smoke from the wildfires. These kinds of things are best conducted under a smoky night sky.

I looked East and pretended for a moment that the smoke was coming from a smoldering volcano. What would we do when this temperamental volcano stopped issuing smoky threats and finally erupted over this tiny village of flamenco dancers and pregnant women and dog owners? Did their raw enthusiasm for the evening matter to the volcano? Did he sense their cheer as audacity in the face of doom, did he see it as an insufficient response to a threat that was intended to be taken seriously?

What did it matter? There was no volcano. And I need to break this habit of directing, in my mind, fruitless and odd Twilight Zone scenarios. How does this serve you? asked a boy to whom I recounted the findings of some study on creativity that concluded that as late-bloomers, we were somewhat doomed.

It doesn't, I said. It didn't. But how could I explain to him that I live in a world of hypotheticals and as time goes on, the hypotheticals become more and more divorced from reality, more and more convoluted. More and more fruitless intellectual exercises that benefit no one. Especially not me. And yet, they are necessary in the face of life's electric shocks. This is what lab rats like me do, I wanted to say. Maybe you're an active lab rat, but I'm a passive one. I need to ponder useless studies and pretend that there is a volcano just a mile and a quarter away from us in order to contend with the impending and erratic shock of what may or may not come. They boy got into his car and drove away from the hypothetical world of the girl who was prepared for any imagined catastrophe, just not a real one.

So there was no volcano, no reality, only us, on the street, with spiked pink lemonades in our hands now, listening to a lousy neighborhood band of shirtless (and hairless) men in cowboy hats.