Friday 2/23/24
In life with people I don't want to do guessing, I want to do clarity. Communicate.
So much of life for people is positioning, posturing, not wishing to say or ask something for concern of what might be thought by the other person as a result. Wanting to seem a certain way. Worrying about undercutting that. Thinking something is too small to bring up or that someone else might believe as much. Appearances, appearances, appearances.
Speak instead. Speak clearly. Or at least be candid. Polite, candid, affable, well-intentioned, sincere. People are both closer then and more useful to each other. Time and energy is saved. There's less waste, fewer unhelpful thoughts, a reduction in speculation, which can only be partially fruitful at best, if we ever even find out what part that was and then we're just looking back and saying, "Oh, that was the correct bit." Ironically, speculation has more to do with the past than the future.
Someone asked me if I met so-and-so at a writer's event. There is one real writer's event and that is writing.
Text:
I'm sorry. I've been having a really tough time. I feel like I'm existing between life and death. I'm in a bad place. I can't do anything. It's like I'm giving up or everything in me is expiring. Thank you for reading all of that. I know it was a lot and mostly aggravating but I think it contained valuable information.
I had various bad dreams last night. There were lizards that ate and regurgitated snakes, a man swinging an axe, a cat I cut in two, the town in which I grew up and this store that had been there for an age that had to move to Cape Cod a few years ago, a swamp by the railroad leading to this passage way taking you to the road overhead that few people knew about and which had an urban legend quality. I got up and listened to an episode of Richard Diamond, Private Detective, about a boxer who throws a fight, unlike "the man of wire" in the Pogues' "The Body of an American": "But he never threw a fight when the fight was right/So they sent him off to war."
Done with "Box Art." That really is masterful. To have that much life in a work is what it's about.
I need to make a study of more of the films that John Alton shot.
Celtics handled the Bulls last night. I fear that they're too three-dependent, though. Can they win in the playoffs when the three-point shot is not falling? Bruins netted a point in an OT loss to the Flames. Respectable result on the second night of a back-to-back after traveling across the continent.
Saw a video this morning that someone took early on another morning--one of those gray winter mornings--in Dogtown in Gloucester of an owl on a tree branch, with the person's dog looking up at the owl. The owl wasn't bothered by the dog, but it still wished to say something about the dog being there, and so it hooted a couple times. Controlled hooting. Here's what you're going to do: You're going to do your work, you're going to keep going, you're going to do everything you have to do, and you're going to get your house back, and you're going to wake up on a Saturday morning and write something that no one who has ever lived or will ever live could write, and then you're going to drive over to Dogtown and you're going to walk in the woods, and then you're going to come home and open this journal--this same record--and you're going to write about what you did and what you saw so far that day. That's what you're going to do. You might not see this owl--though you may--but it will be some owl on a branch on an early gray winter morning like this one.
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