Bench shots, indoor scarves for all occasions, narcissists, sincerity, community, cover and characters

Tuesday 3/5/24

I see these people in publishing who visit a museum and then put up ten photos of themselves on Facebook from their visit to the museum of them sitting on various benches. So, they go, and then they tell someone, "Take another picture of me on this different bench."

They are usually women. I haven't seen a man do this. I'm just saying what I see. Nothing about the art, which is lost on them, or ignored by them, or irrelevant to them. They go to let people know they were there. Me me me me me. Me me me me me me me me me me me me.

Also: It is remarkable how many of these people have their indoor scarves on. How does that work? This indoor scarf is for when I can have photos of me taken at the museum, this indoor scarf is primarily for brunch (I love brunch and never getting up early!), this indoor scarf is for taking a photo of myself in front of my computer like I'm going to write something when in reality I'm just taking the photo and pretending, etc.

Life lived as an affectation.

I abhor narcissists. One of the reasons is their hypocrisy. They aren't even interested in anything interesting. Narcissists are never interesting in and of themselves. So their interest is in something uninteresting, and that's hypocritical to me. You can't even get being interested in something interesting correct?

It is much easier for people to be fake than sincere. To say things that are fake rather than meant. I am the opposite way. It borders on the impossible for me to be insincere. I can not say things, but taint-tonguing--in this sense--is an extreme stretch for me. Being insincere is a matter of saying or repeating things that are not meant and have no intrinsic value. Being sincere requires courage--amazingly, because it shouldn't require any courage at all. That is why people can dish out false praise they don't mean. And it's why people struggle to say what they do mean and feel. Especially to the party responsible in generating those thoughts and feelings.

In order for there to be true community--of any kind--people must think. They can't just be automatically repeating things. That's not real community.

Rare now is the person who would prefer a real connection over a fake compliment. It's like the latter makes for gas in the tank, albeit there's no actual going anywhere.

I haven't mentioned what it entails on here but I have the cover worked out for The Solution to the World's Problems: Surprising Tales of Relentless Joy. It plays off of the present forest in "Best Present Ever." Those who have read the story would know what that means.

Someone was telling me over the weekend how they read it again this past Christmas with their family and I was thinking about how secondary characters are not secondary characters even though there's a main character but it's much more complicated than that--we are the main character, too. There really is no secondary. The blazing being, Binny, both sets of parents--they are all vital important to the story and to Amara's story. You couldn't correctly term any of them secondary. None of the old/traditional labels and concepts apply to my work. It's something else doing something else.

This work exists right now. Obviously. It sits here with me. Later, there will be outrage when people have this story in their lives because they will also know that the world was denied possession of this work. That it was there for all of that time, and they could have had it all along.