welcome to my blog!
A newsletter seems to be a kind of self-serving, masturbatory activity, especially in my case, in that I serve no purpose except to put words on a (web)page, but I have a few intentions, laid out below:
To share excerpts from what I’ve written each week,
To practice gratitude,
To force myself to keep up with reading, with the news. To be more in-tune, basically,
To keep to a schedule, practicing discipline, and
To build my professional repertoire.
As the great Stephen King says,
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”
So if you’ve stuck around through my pre-described masturbatory activities, let’s get started with something I wrote this week.
The windows are starting to fog, and you can’t remember where you told the cab driver to take you.
You trace someone’s name in the condensation, but you can’t read it so you can’t remember who they were either so you wipe it away with the edge of your sleeve. You watch the cotton of your shirt grow fat and dark against your skin, and it’s an ugly sort of thing so you press your forehead against the window and watch telephone poles zip by.
You wonder who’s calling or if anyone even does that anymore, and the grass at the base of each pole is starting to creep up the splintered wood, intertwined like vines, a choking membrane cut short by concrete sidewalks, and you must be somewhere suburban.
“Terrible weather,” your driver says, and there’s something familiar in his voice, something that feels like trust and blind youth, but also like rope burn, and you look up and he’s looking back at you, he’s grinning with too much teeth, split lips, wide eyes and pockmarked skin, and you want to scream, you’re shaking your head, and he’s still driving.
The vein in his neck is a popping, pulsing obscenity, and you can feel sweat beading at your hairline, and you’re not sure how he can drive with his neck twisted like that.
You’re not sure how he can smile that long either, that long and hard, and his teeth are cracking from the strain.
“Is this okay?” he says, and you realize he’s pulled over. The smile is gone, the smile and the rope burn, and you nod and hand him cash you didn’t realize you had before stumbling out and tangling yourself in roadside grass and telephone lines.
This piece has been an interesting experiment for me, in that fiction has been a difficult path for me to follow in recent years. But I’m enjoying the challenge so far, and the full piece has an effect that I can’t wait to share one day.
Next: gratitude
I do that painful, millennial thing where I go to the therapy, and while we discuss various traumas, heartbreaks, etc., she also tells me to remember everything that I’m grateful for. Which I do in a journal, everyday.
If you can’t read that list, the things I’m grateful for include: Sandy (my boyfriend), writing, black beans, ice cream, and my friends.
Some serious sappy shit, but I do love ice cream and black beans and my boyfriend, I suppose.
Let’s finish up with a few things I love - memes. A writing blog/newsletter, yes, but memes are fun, and I like fun things.
Thanks for sticking around! Can’t wait to write (and read) more!
