You can chart it on a graph or you can sing it in a song
I know I have been ignoring you, Imaginary Audience. It is because I've kind of disappeared into fiction lately, writing vignettes for thingsthatcantbetakenback.blogspot.com (which by the way it would be a great favor to me if you would read that site and tell your friends about it) or working on my next novel or toying around with two graphic novel ideas, one about Emily Dickinson and the other about Walt Whitman. If there's one thing I know how to do, it's write something for an audience that doesn't exist.
Anyway, it is high time for an update. Tomorrow I move to Denton, TX to work on my PhD, and I go alone. Those of you who just know me from here or from back when I did AHPT probably don't know that I'm getting divorced, but that's okay. We're still friends in whatever way we've been friends. Besides, I've always felt safer the less you really knew about me. I could be a tightly controlled persona then instead of a messy person, a voice shouting into the wind, being heard or not, no matter. The shouting was where it counted.
But I've figured something out that I wanted to say. I used to think that life was a thousand thousand stories stacked unending, that you could pluck one out and say "here's the arc, here's the beginning and end, here's what I learned." I think a lot of writers think this way, like because they build characters and stories that are finite so too is their personal narrative. But that's bullshit. You get one story that builds on itself, and the burdens in one chapter carry over into the next, and each individual moment is connected to the others in ways that are often frightening and beyond our control.
Here, my urge is to say goodbye to my old life, which was a good life until it got bad because of my own depression and the mistakes I made in trying to ameliorate it. I want to say I am starting anew. Again, though, that's bullshit. I carry all of this with me to Denton as surely as if it were in the U-Haul trailer. As I get in my car and turn on the Mountain Goats "The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton" and drive away from my parents' house, where I've been living since June, I have twenty-eight years of mistakes and pain and joy that I have to face down every day until I am dirt. Sometimes I feel good about that, and sometimes I don't. I think that's being alive.
Anyway, it is high time for an update. Tomorrow I move to Denton, TX to work on my PhD, and I go alone. Those of you who just know me from here or from back when I did AHPT probably don't know that I'm getting divorced, but that's okay. We're still friends in whatever way we've been friends. Besides, I've always felt safer the less you really knew about me. I could be a tightly controlled persona then instead of a messy person, a voice shouting into the wind, being heard or not, no matter. The shouting was where it counted.
But I've figured something out that I wanted to say. I used to think that life was a thousand thousand stories stacked unending, that you could pluck one out and say "here's the arc, here's the beginning and end, here's what I learned." I think a lot of writers think this way, like because they build characters and stories that are finite so too is their personal narrative. But that's bullshit. You get one story that builds on itself, and the burdens in one chapter carry over into the next, and each individual moment is connected to the others in ways that are often frightening and beyond our control.
Here, my urge is to say goodbye to my old life, which was a good life until it got bad because of my own depression and the mistakes I made in trying to ameliorate it. I want to say I am starting anew. Again, though, that's bullshit. I carry all of this with me to Denton as surely as if it were in the U-Haul trailer. As I get in my car and turn on the Mountain Goats "The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton" and drive away from my parents' house, where I've been living since June, I have twenty-eight years of mistakes and pain and joy that I have to face down every day until I am dirt. Sometimes I feel good about that, and sometimes I don't. I think that's being alive.