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After the rain, from the living room.
The most difficult thing about writing, for me at least, is sitting down to do it. It’s strange, because I enjoy writing so much once I’ve started, but I have a hard time clearing the time and physical space necessary to work effectively. One of the fatal errors I make over and over is failing to set my writing space apart from my living space in general. I’m writing this from the kitchen table.
This is a problem for my writing life, and my personal life. I start writing, but to Andrea, it looks like I’m just sitting at the kitchen table, surfing the internet or whatever. So she asks me the sort of inane question all people who live together ask each other, like whether or not I’ve seen her coat, and, in my feeble mind, she’s interrupting me in the middle of a torturous sentence. I lose my train of thought, I get mad, she gets offended, no good. Tomorrow, after my job hunt, I’m making myself a workspace in my grandparents’ bedroom, locked away in the unused back part of our borrow home.
The problem with setting up a dedicated workspace is that I share my writing instrument with Andrea and my other computing activities. Her computer’s on the fritz, so the problem is especially acute right now. I’ve been playing around with an old typewriter, but its quaintness and air of gravitas do not outweigh its inefficiency, at least not for me. So I’ll have to start kidnapping the laptop too. Sorry, baby.
This is a lot of bitching about the minor hurdles I have to deal with. Things are otherwise as good as they’ve been in a long long time. I’ve been vacationing in this house, where Andrea and I are now living, since I was a kid; these are comfortable surroundings for me. The house itself is beautiful, set on a beautiful piece of property with a creek in the back. The kitchen table is actually a great place to write from, I can see the birds pecking away at the feeder, at the food Andrea left out for them.
And here’s why I need to establish a good writing routine, a better life routine, in fact: I don’t want to write about San Diego. I mean, I want to write about, I want to get the story out of me, put it all on paper, sort it out, make sense of it all, put order to it, or write it off as a series of random events, but I hate to think about that city, and everything that happened to me there, and everything I did there, and the noise, and latent violence, heavy in the air as the humidity, as the smell of the ocean. I need the routine so that I can say I gave it my best effort. That I really tried to write that damned story. And if I still can’t pull a coherent story from the mess of my memories of San Diego, after I’ve really assigned myself to the task, well, then I’ll say, “It’s just too soon, I’m still too young.” And I can start writing a different story. But if I keep pecking at this book, writing when I feel like writing, instead of regularly, every day, I’ll be left with a pile of pretty vignettes and a knot of loose strands. That sounds much worse than having to borrow the laptop from Andrea.
Personal Note: Four days off the smokes and counting! Thanks Nicopatch! Kids, never ever start smoking. Ever. Seriously.
March 5, 2009
Wild turkey.
Ok, I know I said new stuff was coming yesterday, and there’s nothing, but… I bring gifts in supplication: two new series of posts! I’ll cover those in a second, but first, personal news/excuse: Andrea and I are quitting smoking, for reasons that include our own health, the health of our beautiful pug dog Ignatius, and vanity. We started on the patch yesterday, which is the main reason why I’m just now getting this post up.
It’s a bit stressful quitting smoking, and though we’re both on nicotine patches, we decided that this Sunday and Monday were good days to sleep in, eat fatty breakfasts/lunches and say, “I love you,” a lot. Love works, to put it crudely, like the best bank account you ever had: God help you if you make a false deposit or overdraw, but the credit and interest build fast and strong.
As for the two new series:
(Drumroll…)
Series 1: My Downtown Year
– Written in the summer and fall of 2004 (not my finest seasons, for oh so many reasons), this incomplete, post-post-postist, marginally-fictional, semi-conceived series of what-was-supposed-to-be-365 “daily” installments, serves as a reference point/verite intro to what I’m writing now; it’s a prequel, sorta. And you’re getting it here, now, absolutely FREE (out of context and in little excerpts, but still…)!!!!
*WARNING/SPOILER ALERT!!*
My Downtown Year contains: accounts of nudity, sexuality and marijuana use and abuse, rhetorical displays of now-embarrassing love and near-plagiarism of the late Hunter S. Thomson, and a pasty flair for the dramatic. Please read this in context: as a teaser; this should be read as the failed “novel” of a character in my current novel, which will be, God-willing, nothing like this series in any way. If all this disclaimer and context isn’t charming enough, remember, the character in my current novel , the one who wrote this little fiasco of a series is: me! BUT, it’s me five years ago, and writing in the first-person as a fictional character. Granted, that fictional character is myself as Raoul Duke. Yikes. BUT, it’s still a good read. I hope.
Please please, use the comments. Email me at: jesse.rosato@gmail.com, unless you are a spam robot.
Whew. Ok. (Drumoll? Drumoll, please? I know you’re tired, please though, just a little drumroll? Ok. Fine. No Drumroll.)
Series 2: San Diego, a Journal
– Yes, yes, yes! This is the hot-off-the-grill new stuff. Daily writing journals! Sounds lame, but I’m really excited about this. This is gonna be where I work out what I’m going through as I settle into writing the story of San Diego as I saw it. I’ll be talking detail selection, use of jargon, exactness of “quoted dialogue”, self-censorship, the writing guts. If I stall and fail and flame out, at the very least I’ll write about that. Right here, absolutely FREE!!!!
You’ll find the first installment of My Downtown Year below, and the first part of San Diego… will be here tomorrow. I’ll be rotating them like that and interspersing a potpourri of other curiosities for a while, so read on, and stay tuned!
March 2, 2009: One Day Smoke-Free.
I'll take my Chevrolegs.
I take my pack of cigarettes from my right pants-pocket, remove one from the pack and place it between my lips. I close the paper flip-top lid and stuff the crumpling pack back in my right pants-pocket. I take a red plastic lighter from my left pants-pocket and use it to light the cigarette between my lips. I take my phone from my right sweater-pocket and check the time. I have fifteen minutes to make it to work. I usually give myself half-an-hour to make this walk. I wonder if I can catch a cab closer to downtown. Shit. No money. I walk faster.
I drag on my cigarette and my stomach churns and gurgles echoes of a receding flu. I reach the bridge into the financial district and flick my cigarette into the street. It’s run over by a small gray Toyota, northbound. The pressure of my backpack against my sweater against my t-shirt against my dermis heats the latter above its sweat threshold, and moisture gathers in the small of my back, in the hallows between my clavicles and deltoids under the straps of the backpack. I stop on the bridge and take off my backpack. I put it on the ground at the base of the suicide-fence and take off my sweater. I open my backpack and put my sweater inside. I zip the backpack closed.
I touch the back of my right hand against my shirt, just above my hips. I feel the sweat come through the once-worn white t-shirt. I lift my left arm and see a small yellow oval against a field of white cotton, bound for growth. I look through the green mesh of the suicide-fence at the freeway below, at the cars rushing across it. Ceaseless. I think about how I might survive the fall:
A panicked but alert motorist applies the brakes forcefully and leans hard on the wheel. The car veers into the next lane and collides with another, and another, and another, piling up and flipping and crushing and tumbling and rear-ending into an automotive hurricane with me as the eye. A nonplussed island in a sea of mangled metal.
I shoulder my load and feel the cooled sweat set on my skin. I start walking again.
At First and Broadway, an old black man in a security guard’s uniform and cataract sunglasses is arguing with a crackhead in front of the Wendy’s. They’re yelling, but I’m not close enough to hear what they’re saying. The light changes and I cross Broadway towards them.
“Fuck you!” the crackhead is yelling. ”Fuckin’ sunabitch dirty mother fucker I should…”
“I told you calm down nigger,” growls the old black man in the security guard’s uniform as I step onto the sidewalk and turn up Broadway. He lifts his hand in a fist and puts it in the crackhead’s face. It looks like he threw a punch that fell a foot short. The crackhead stares at the fist, at the small metal can it holds. The old man with the cataract sunglasses presses down on the top of the small metal can. A spray like a squirt gun, or a sad seltzer bottle, streams silently into the crackhead’s face. He stares defiantly at the old man, his eyes already blood shot. I look at the old man’s cataract glasses and I look at the crackhead’s eyes, drifting, blind now. He stumbles towards the corner, into a bank of newspaper machines.
“Gawn now,” says the old man after him, retaking his post in front of the Wendy’s.
My eyes start to itch and water so I move on up Broadway, towards Fourth, on my walk to work.
January 19, 2009
