i'll die. i won't die.

so, it seems to me that a lot of people like to tell young writers who are just starting out, just learning, that in order to become a better writer you have to write everyday.

WTF EVERYDAY!?!

okay, wait.

i want to believe that the more you write, the better you get. i want to believe that there's a clear cut path to getting better, and i want to be on that path. especially when the people who endorse that path are people that i really really admire, like lorrie moore and many others. and you know, i do believe it. i believe that if you write everyday you will become a better writer. i mean, why wouldn't you? but i don't write everyday, and as a teacher told me sophomore year, we do not live in a writer's world. what she meant by this is that everything in our environment prevents writing. i realized this was true. even ipods stop me from writing. not paper writing, but thought writing. the kind where you come up with lines, sentences, what have you, in your head while just walking around or riding the train (these two activities currently take up 98% of my time.) you spend that time walking around with someone else's words in your head instead of your own, and it gets in the way.

the other tough thing about writing is that no one really cares if you do it. i don't mean this in any kind of self-effacing way, but really. no one cares. if you stop writing, no one really cares. i have a lot of friends who write, a lot of friends who i care about deeply. but if they stopped writing, no. i wouldn't care. and i don't think that they would care if i stopped writing. and i don't think my teachers would care if i stopped writing. and after a few years, i probably wouldn't care either and THAT IS A SCARY SCARY THOUGHT. writing is very fragile. luckily i live with a writer, one of the ones i care about, who understands and lets me eat her left over spring rolls while i complain when i get home from work, and i know we're all afraid.

i want to do a better job as a writer. i haven't been "showing up for myself", as a teacher put it freshman year. i went to talk to this teacher about my situation, and after i explained in a convoluted, "oh it's not a big deal, whatever, you knowww," but actually pretty concerned way, he advised me to go look for it.

so maybe the way you look for it is by writing. and how you write reflects how you're looking. sometimes writing is something that's lost like your keys, and you HAVE TO FIND IT RIGHT NOW or else you can't leave the house, and you're frustrated and you're making so many piles in order to find it. other times i think it's lost like a shirt that you want to wear, but you can't find it so you just watch 8 episodes of 30 rock, i mean, uh, wear a different shirt. other times, it finds you and this feels like a snow day. like class getting cancelled. like an accident. and then you're not sure how it happened, or if it will ever happen again.

what ever happened to predictability?

sometimes i think i could have been an astrologer (astrologist? i don't know.) i guess in not knowing the correct word i pretty much gave away the fact that i know nothing about astrology. but i think i have a good sense of rhythm when it comes to, uh, life. maybe.

did you ever hear that silver jews song, "we are real?" get that shit. it's on the american water album. the lead singer/songwriter of the silver jews is david berman. he's a great poet as well, his book is called actual air. i go back and forth on which i like better: his music or his poetry. luckily no law requires me to decide.  anyway, there's a line in that song: "like background singers they all come in threes." amen, david berman, you genius poet, you. it's unspecific in the song, who or what the "they" refers to. a lot of shit does come in threes: deaths, break ups, etc.. good things too sometimes like... births, meals? i don't know. i'm feeling on the pessimistic side of things today and clearly need a hot meal.

i've been thinking about life's rhythm in the context that, as i predicted, 2009 has been a complete, unmitigated shitstorm so far. i won't go into why because a) eh. and b) it's impossible due the fact that it requires too many unfoldings and understandings of the individual that are pretty difficult to access in this whole business of being human on this planet. all i'm saying is that the odd years are usually... well, odd. for me. i've talked to some people who like odd years best, but what's interesting is that they too make the distinction. it makes me wonder if there is some kind of regulation as to what happens to who and when. like people get assigned odds or evens. so if that is the case, does that mean that the universe is actually kind of... fair? that's all i have at the moment. 

please enjoy this poem by david berman:

Of Things Found Where They Are Not Supposed To Be

I am shivering, reading cold northeastern prose

and there is a word for what I do

but I do it anyway,

carefully setting dinner on the table uncooked, 

before setting the table on fire.

The sky hovers overhead holding up dotted lines drawn from

the binoculars to the birds.

A woman whispers into her sugar bowl,

"Slowly, over time, you will be lent to the neighbors."

At the bus terminal, behind the candy machine,

there is a tunnel that comes out in the prison library,

and it's all pinned to a shimmering screen

by the slide projector's cone of lit dust.

Can I safely say that Greece was mainly

water, rock, and ideas?

My statistics show that several thousand years of rain

have done little damage to the planet, 

yet imagine if that amount had fallen indoors.

Imagine this girl, a winsome beauty previously existing

only on a rejected coin design, imagine her driving through the old

seaboard slave states,

with a treasury of college fight songs,

"in the tape deck."

The rose bushes look like Latin homework

on the pond's reflective skin.

Like a "hullo!" up a rainpipe, it bears me homeward,

not asking for a quick peek at the shade inside objects,

but simply admiring the Precambrian skyline of the car keys

that took us away from the colony of motels

scattered like mushrooms about the beltway's exit ramp.

And yet it's so strange that we've come to this,

and to think that someday we'll come back to it

from the opposite direction.

On the streets I look out for people from the future.

They try to play it cool so no one notices, taking taxis,

calling the driver "Mac," in what they mistakenly

believe to be the lingo of the day.

When I see L.A. fireplaces reflected in L.A. wineglasses,

crows wired to the sky like marred pixels,

and "you" with your little tail of vowels,

I start to believe that the inscription above the portal

describes this side, not the exit.

For now just keep smiling and nodding

as if you were in a foreign country,

painfully grasping a pineapple.