#19 A bird flies into a window

A shi**y essay with a potentially good point

I spent this entire week trying to write an essay that absolutely would not work. Also, I do not mean *entire week* in some extra, exaggerative way. I mean I spent above twenty hours over the course of four days fighting with eight terrible fucking paragraphs that never amounted to anything more than “blech.”

I was trying to write about this sequence of events: A bird died in front of me; it’s death inspired a revelation that had me waxing poetic about how quickly life changes and how the fragility is what makes it all so good; which got me wondering why I couldn’t remember that same awe-struck wonder when things actually and truly fall horribly apart; how then like clockwork things actually and truly fell horribly apart; the subsequent and immediate opportunity to practice loving the precariousness of life in the full bloom of an unwanted event with the revelation close enough to motivate me to act differently; a variety of sub-events (a reverse license plate lookup; an immersive performance in a moonlit orchard with a dancing sun, a water blessing, a hugging rain cloud that watered my seeds; Mark politely choking on a Calabrian chilis).

If none of that makes sense to you that’s because it won’t; it refuses to. Just trust me there was a lot of good content there, an embarrassment of riches, a gift from the writing Gods, a lesson with a story and a story with a lesson, and I should have been able to write it.

Since Sunday morning all of my time and attention and energy went to making that essay work, in that creamy obsessive way I get when I can’t crack it but just know I have to and that all my future work depends on this one essay being good. It’s not a zone so much as a very unhealthy psychological state where I have to win writing and it’s easy to believe anything I’ve ever created of value is a fluke. [Insert all the spiraling thoughts here].

Wednesday night after saving the fortieth version of that unworkable essay I sent the final draft to my friend who said “Perfection. you did it. now submit it,” which I knew was really code for “stop sending me this fucking trash.” I finally pried it from my grippy clammy fingers and my greedy pinching mind, put my computer down, and, because it was eleven p.m. and I could not turn my brain off, I went upstairs so I could pretend to read a book but really obsess about the essay some more.

The point I was trying to make in it was something about how easy it is to be open to and in love with the unexpected when your life is going well and things are working out as you would have them, how much harder that is to pull off when shit goes to hell, and how on this one specific night (after the bird, before the reverse plate lookup) I was able to maintain that openness and presence while a terrible thing was happening in the background of my life. How I put on my mascara, laughed at dinner, funky-chickened at that theater kid’s event; how I did not shut down, not even a little, as my heart broke.

I don’t want to downplay that last bit because it was a big deal: to remain curious and at the margins instead of plunged into the center of your already-constructed storyline while in the midst of a painful, unwanted event is the cheese, and I am still congratulating myself for it. The irony is that in trying to tell the story of how I found all this open space during an event that normally reduces my perspective to a pin prick, I lost all my perspective, and I spent four days in total hell resisting the mess that is the process of writing in order to tell you in less than a thousand words how for one shining moment I’d conquered the mess that is the process of living.

Next week I finally am finally moving back to California. In March 2020, I packed my cat and some bags, moved to an empty house in the Catskills I’d bought in order to do something smart with my book advance. This house and this hamlet (I live in a hamlet) was always meant to be an appendix, something to do with the overflow of my life, never intended to hold me. We (cat and me) were only meant to stay the two weeks I imagined it would take for covid to run its course, and then somehow life kept rotating until this home became my entire world and everything else became a footnote.

I have done almost nothing with myself here. I have slept, I have cried, I have meditated inconsistently. I’ve watched a lot of TV, drank a lot of coffee, made up for decades of sleep deprivation, talked on the phone like it was 1992. I have not toned my body, run that marathon, written that book, stuck with any self-improvement plans. Mostly, I’ve waited, and felt guilty about that waiting. If I let it, it can feel like nothing, like writing forty versions of an essay that will never see the light of day, a waste. I don’t let it.

I don’t think what I’m saying has any clear thing to do with seeing a bird pop to its death against your speeding car, but it does have to do with the way you might measure your life and what counts. I’ve spent so long trying to win the lessons, win the writing, win life. Show my work and therefore my worth, tidy it up into what passes for time well spent, tie the condition of being okay to some kind of external, observable thing. I think here, in these woods, on top of getting to the end of HBO Max, maybe I’ve started to learn that it isn’t about some end product, a thing you can point to. Maybe the point is that so much of it seems like nothing, and that nothing turns out to be more valuable than any something ever was.

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Republishing my old blogs

I’m slowly posting old articles from my archive. Please note these are old; I value them because they were true when I wrote them; not all of them reflect who I am today or what I’d write or how I’d write it. This week I added:

1. A piece on the sexual assault allegations against the founder of Kundalini, Yogi Bhajan: Premka: On Kundalini yoga, sexual assault, and spiritual bypassing

2. A Kundalini meditation I still use for anxiety

3. 9 ways yoga helped me overcome addiction

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Ten Things Right Now

How to define misogyny, Botox vs. Calories, hangover cures and new alcohol drugs, a song on repeat, fucking sober.

1. I announced my new book deal on Instagram a few weeks ago (while also announcing I’m taking a long break from Instagram to focus on writing). This also means I’m in that blank page part (as evidenced by this essay?) where I’m digging back into new and old resources. Body Work (craft book) by Melissa Febos is brilliant; this essay by Ann Patchett on self-forgiveness in writing; Courtney Maum’s new newsletter (Before and After the Book Deal; Stephen King’s On Writing; Mary Karr’s Art of Memoir; this article on why writers need to create with their most unpleasant emotions.

2. Courtney Maum has a new newsletter (also see #1; this is worth its own bullet) where she’s recommending books weekly based on mood (!) and doling out writing and publishing advice and holding office hours and in general being the patron saint of the publishing world.

3. The song Ahsokan Farewell that I have on repeat as I plan to say farewell (for now at least) to the Ashokan region of the Catskills, the place that’s kept me these past few years and made me into something almost totally unrecognizable from whence I came. Yes, I cry each time I hear it. Yes, I can’t wait to get back to my family, animal-style grilled cheese, overpriced oat milk matcha lattes, a town with over 2,000 people, a place where I make sense.

4. This essay by Dani Medrano on the made-up rules of recovery is so good

5. This podcast by Virginia Sole-Smith on Burnt Toast (highly recommend) with Jessica Defino of The Unpublishable (a favorite favorite) about the intersection of diet culture and beauty culture has me thinking about how flip I am talking about my own use of Botox while I’d never in a million years talk about my caloric intake; last week I gave a beauty product tip and talked about fillers which felt neutral, and yet I can’t imagine a world where I’d pass on a tip about sculpting my ass (which I don’t do, but if I did I wouldn’t.) It’s a short, fascinating listen.

6. A coffee drink at Rough Draft books invented by a one Josh, made of cold brew, root beer syrup, a shit ton of half and half

7. A new “cure” for poisoning; a new drug in development to help with AUD; Ketamine for alcohol addiction; Thailand becomes the first Asian country to remove cannabis from a controlled substance list; Big Psychedelic is big

8. Why

9. To the man friend who tried to rebut my insistence that the Heard-Depp trial shit-show was about misogyny, and couldn’t define misogyny: recommended reading.

10. How to have sober sex

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