There isn't a mission. There isn't a goal. It's just words on fake paper, sliding and tripping and flowing all over the place, because we're all full up on words in here and there is no way we can keep them inside. Like Tony says, "Nothing in here is true."

Tuesday, January 06, 2009

3.

Sitting back on the couch, listening to that little chit-chit noise, drinking some leftover beer she bought for her dad to drink at Christmastime, she realized that it was probably a healthy thing she wasn't actually making lists about the potential success of an evening like this one.

This was the new normal for her, the way life would be for half the nights for forever. No kids in the house, no brain-scrambling moments of distress about whether they're awake or need something. No lunches to make or careless tasks to take her mind off the silence. And certainly no one interesting enough to disturb this pattern for the near future.

She idly picked at the bottle's label, making a little pile of paper beads on the maroon couch cushion. She got up from the couch and the wrapper-paper scattered everywhere. Normally, a kid making -- plotting out, really -- such a mess would be worthy of a quick comment. But she let the beads fall. She ducked out of the tv room, down the hall through the back bedroom and out to the patio. She was hiding cigarettes, pitifully, from nobody but herself, and she shook one out of the pack as she collapsed into a plastic chair and eyed the darkness. She heard a car door in the next garage, or maybe just blocking the alley, but didn't think much of it. It was an apartment in a city that nodded but never went completely to sleep. Footfalls approached and instead of passing and getting quiet as they receded, they stopped. Close to the gate to the garage, she thought.

Friday, January 02, 2009

2.

The chit chit sound of the nearly-frozen hedges dancing on the windows was actually doing its designated b-movie job of putting her on edge. The entire night had been a complete bust. The list she made of the events that would have qualified the night as worthwhile was actually pretty exhaustive, and yet not a single one would have a check next to it.

The unshaven face, the pissy attitude, the baffling fifteen minute conversation about cheeseburgers (cheeseburgers?), all of it was off the list.

Thursday, January 01, 2009

1.

Journals are things writers keep to keep the muscle tone, the systems lubricated for when they are called upon to truly write something. Almost no writer says, "The secret is to to only write when you feel like you've got something to say. Otherwise, just browse the web for a while, masturbate and go to sleep." No, of course they say, "The key is to write every day. Whether it's a grocery list or an epic poem or a short story about a short-sighted canary in love with a hand of bananas on the counter in the kitchen adjacent, just write."

And this is advice I haven't heeded up to now. Oy, I'm tired. And I can find something else to do every night and every day. Work is work, it swallows all the time, expands to fill the space like a gas and suddenly you aren't doing anything but work.

And there's family, and a dog, and the trash bins to take to the curb, and grandparents to update about the lives of the children, and bills to pay and small stuff to sweat, and suddenly you haven't written anything since the short story about the infatuation and the moonlight, which felt like genius but probably was more like meh.

What then to do? How to tackle this problem, reset the balance and find this sliver of time? Just do.