Author’s note: This is from a series based on my journal. Unconventional and idiosyncratic punctuation and formatting are intentional.
This morning soon after coming downstairs I posted the next piece in my journal series where Laura says that she finds my writing about daily life relatable and I hope that is the case not just for her but for other people. I woke up 40 minutes before my alarm and was not able to go back to sleep and wish that I had gotten up before I started to feel uneasy about things that don’t matter and that now I can’t remember except being concerned about the grocery having bagged kale. I had some of the coffee from Quills I bought at Rainbow Blossom the other day. It’s a single origin dark roast called Black Condor whose flavor notes include milk chocolate and pomegranate. I tasted raisins. I tasted smooth. I tasted close enough. Some broccoli in the refrigerator froze and then thawed and spoiled. It reeked. I had a notification of a new follower named Kit and thought at first it might be Aunt Kit but the person’s profile says Everyday mom, wife, dog mother blue dot. Aunt Kit does not have a dog. She has orchids. Somehow I have a seven-day streak in Connections going. Dingaling should have been among Spelling Bee’s answers today.
Last night I dreamed about roasting a pork tenderloin for dinner and having it with mashed potatoes and three-bean salad from a can. Donnie the butcher at the grocery repackaged the pork tenderloin for me. It was too big for its original packaging. I took it from the case and cradled it in my arms and cooed at it, This is good. At another point or in another dream I was on vacation in an Airbnb whose floor sloped toward a door blocked with a lumpy brown leather couch and cracked peach-colored plaster walls with some of the brick underneath exposed. This won’t do, I said. I had trouble loading the Airbnb website on my laptop to find other accommodations. Finally I switched to an iPad and found something more suitable except the process of doing that was more like surfing a dating site. I just swiped right until I found something whose looks I liked. William and Polly were born three months early and weighed just over two pounds each. Seeing them in the NICU I remember thinking, This is about the size of a pork tenderloin.
In their writing group this morning Cindy and Alison shared a poem called Witness and suggested writing about what it feels like to be endlessly bombarded by the news and ways of coping with it. I wrote about how I try not to think about the news because when I think about it I have no words for it but I end up thinking about it anyway because somehow there is no not thinking about it. Thinking about the news so much I wonder why I don’t write about it. Maybe not writing about it is one way I cope with it. Kate wrote about losing the ability to be appalled by the colossal callousness and cruelty of the president and his administration and how she is astonished that she has become someone who wishes and looks forward to the death of another. I was wrong, she said. So was I. Every day I wake up I wish the president would not. Peter picked up on the word breaking in the poem to riff an inventive crescendo that began with breaking rules and laws and hearts and habits to breaking down and through and even to seeing the breaking light of a new day. Ginny wrote about befriending two young girls who recently moved into her neighborhood and the wonder and joy she’s found in the wonder and joy they still find in the world.
At the grocery there was plenty of bagged kale as well as plenty of bunches of kale, packed into the case as dense as a taxus hedge and sparkling with water from the mister. I checked out with Michelle with Max the big-bellied cashier with red dreads in the lane next to hers. I haven’t seen Max in a while and I would have said hello if we had caught each other’s eyes but every time I looked his way he was looking elsewhere. On my way home at Speedway a man in dirty torn jeans and a black hoodie asked me for money. Instead I bought him a Coke inside when I paid for my gas. Outside the man stood leaning with one hand against a nearby pump. Got a dollar? he said when I gave him the Coke. He followed me to my car and said something to me after I was inside that I could hear but not understand. The man hitched his pants and went into the store and I saw the Coke on the ground by the pump.
This evening Meg posted an interview with Diane about being persistent with submitting work. If you believe in a piece of writing, don’t give up on it, Diane says, rejection is part of the process. At the end Meg asked Diane for a writing prompt and she suggested writing a story using the word starlorn from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It means a feeling of loneliness from looking up at the night sky. Is there a word for the feeling of looking up at the sky at night and being unable to see the stars because of all the light from the ground bleaching them out? Meg posted a prompt to write about a character who becomes obsessed with sales as a way of compensating for unhappiness and suggests trying to include a feeling of regret and the memory of something lost and included a black-and-white photo of two mannequins each with a sign pinned to its chest saying SALE. Neither figure has a head, arms, or legs. I looked up a writer named Sarah Manguso who Fisher told me about the other day. She was trying to think of other writers who write diaries. A few years ago Manguso wrote a memoir called Ongoingness about how she kept a diary to fight her fear of forgetting. She kept the diary for 25 years. It totaled 800,000 words. Manguso is an accomplished writer and she has published widely, from poetry and fiction to operatic and choral libretti, but her concerns about keeping a diary are not mine. I am not fighting anything in keeping a diary. I am just writing.
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Yes, that I find your writing so often relatable makes it interesting for me. I many months ago got over the feeling that I should not wish for his death. We all eventually die.
You have introduced me to a new reference book: the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. That one will be worthy of research. I, too, avoid thinking about the news. Until I can vote, what is there to be said?