5 am
Sleep drool invades my chin, and I’m up. It’s that time anyway, to get stuff done. This little room where I sleep gets easily congested, so it isn’t hard leaving my bed. Shower doesn’t get very hot, so it’s easy to wake up. I don’t have much in the fridge, so it isn’t hard to convince myself I should get out of the apartment. I hate leaving, but no reason to stay is compelling enough to do so, thus my departure.
Sidewalk feels especially hard today. My shoes are wearing down. Not having a car will do this to your shoes. In this city. Where am I going? Invariably lulled by the awful music emanating from traffic, walking in no particular direction, I think coffee makes sense. There’s a little place two blocks up, one to the left. Despite the humid heat, hot caffeine is my current destination.
Noon
Last year I was in Berlin for a few days with my mother and younger brother. We walked a lot and had good beer and ate schnitzel, played cards in the hotel room at night, overall thoroughly enjoying the city. One day we went to a museum where there was an exhibit of ancient Japanese samurai armor. Although I’ve always liked reading various manga and watching anime, along with the classic Mizoguchi samurai films (fuck Kurosawa, though not really, but I don’t care for him like I do the other Japanese greats), I didn’t really care about going to the exhibit. But since my younger brother could hardly ever be convinced into checking out a museum, unless firearms were involved, the exhibit interested him enough to go. While we were perusing the numerous variations of war adornments, my brother and I struck up a conversation about Mongolia and England, the Opium wars, imperialism, libraries, and it occurred to me that despite my brother’s resilience to “intellectualism,” something passed down to us automatically by our parents seeing as how they are both professors involved in literary theory, he was nonetheless very intelligent.
I was thinking about what to eat for lunch, remembering this odd museum memory, when my phone vibrated in my pants. It was my brother calling. I answered, said hello, told my brother about the memory I remembered, and he told me he didn’t mean to call me, but accidentally hit the button when he went over my name in his address book. I said fine, and hung up.
4 pm
Today has been a good day. Very productive on the writing front. Means to say things have been found. I never like to write things down on paper before I type them into my computer, but today I got really involved in a recently purchased notebook. The computer was in my bedroom, and while I was having an afternoon coffee, I didn’t feel like getting off the couch to get it (the computer), and a fortuitous pencil was on the coffee table, so I started writing in the notebook. It was refreshing. I’d always thought writing with a pencil was so typical, and I really hate the transcribing, the automatic editing that occurs when you transfer something from paper to digital. You invariably change things, but I find when I type on the computer that my thought process leads directly to the correct thing to say. This isn’t because I’m some genius, my writing is rarely published, I’m actually not even sure how I support myself, but because I take so long to actually write anything. I’m not in the camp that believes a constant stream of writing, forcing yourself to write everyday will eventually produce results. I conjure up all my words in my head, sculpting and rearranging all the time, forgetting too. This is my process, so that when it’s time to write, the editing has all taken place. Yes a word or two, a sentence here or there, adjustments all take place after being typed, but whenever I’ve attempted to “free write” or write on paper first, I’ve either scrapped completely what was written, or morphed it so much once I typed it that the exercise always proves fruitless.
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