I wore a Calvin and Hobbes shirt to the gym. The run down 56th Street depressed me. I wheezed. Thought, as usual, about my last cigarette. Then about will power. Then about not writing. Then about trying to get the whole process started again. A stack of unedited bullshit sitting on my desk. Unanswered emails.
“What do you like about writing?” she had asked, sitting in front of wine glasses.
And there were any number of things I could say. The usual nonsense about hope and the power of words. About getting nice emails. About the thrill of revising and re-revising sentences until they fit into iambics. Secret codes to myself. Inventing characters out of thin air.
But, hello, I write about folding underwear and about laundry machines. I write about freight trains and supermarkets. I write to exorcise monstrous cliches. I write because if I get something on the page, I can drink bourbon in the air conditioning. I can sit shirtless in the living room with my eyes closed while my roommate sleeps. I can sit and not write. This is why I write. I write to be done. Because if I can’t get the words down, then I just lie awake and watch documentaries about the Civil War, about the Revolutionary War, about fonts.
I write a lot about lying awake.
I thought about this again when I was folding underwear tonight. About the elastic in my boxer-briefs suddenly seeming stretched. The gradual process suddenly revealing itself: these things could fall at any moment.
Getting things on the page again. Things that can be read by other people. It’s important. Moving the fingers across keys.
Here’s a sentence that I wrote a few days ago that at some point, I thought, had legs:
“And there, in a pile of clean laundry, I just lost it. Absolutely and totally lost it. Couldn’t move. Paralyzed by some heavy sense of indifference or lethargy or uselessness.”
And another phrase, this one about graduation:
“Something to do with oncomingness of the real world, again.”
When you write about underwear elastic and cicadas and freight trains, you run into a lot of language like this. The abstract, adorned, baroque, drivel that surfaces in the most desperate moments. I mean, come on, ONCOMINGNESS? Let’s get real about this. Try it again:
I couldn’t remember if I had used fabric softener or not, and so I pressed the Calvin and Hobbes t-shirt my sister had given me for Christmas and inhaled. I caught a whiff of detergent and a lingering shadow of body odor. Something like soap-covered mildew. And, you know, right then in that background radiation of sweat, I decided to hit something very hard. I turned to the laundry machine and punched the hell out of it. Unfortunately, I also ripped open a freshly-healed cut and started to bleed on a few socks that I had thrown on the floor. And this was it, right here. My real life ticking away. Bleeding on my sock because I was so upset that detergent hadn’t gotten the smell of sweat out of my shirt.
I dunno. Maybe a freight train could pass in the distance right then. We’ll see where it goes.
