Hi.
Coffee: Cafe Pajaro Extra Dark, Trader Joe’s Brand
It’s New Years Eve. I guess my clock was a day off because I couldn’t sleep at all last night. I’m exhausted. I might miss the ball drop. Years ago, that’s something that might have bothered me, but I’ve grown comfortable missing out.
There’s this myth that life is the big moments. That’s why there’s an entire industry around weddings. But after the wedding, after you’re back from the honeymoon, what then? I’m as much a fan of pomp and circumstance as anyone, but I worry about those people that live life expecting it. What’s left when the ball drops and the bars close? Just a bunch of guys and gals in jumpers cleaning up the mess.
I read another chapter of Killing Commendatore at 9:30 last night. It might be what kept me up. I wouldn’t call it great. I would call it mesmerizing. The chapter went to great lengths to describe a painting that doesn’t exist. Very Murakami. And there I was in the margins watching a fake man dissect a fake painting. The fan was on. The lights were off. When I tried to sleep, the room was a bit too hot, too bright. But there I was.
On the other side is that modern yuppie zen shit. Culturally appropriated excuses for privileged white adults to work themselves at the bare minimum, thereby buying into a status quo that fully supports them at the expense of other people’s labor. Lazy. A bad look.
So as the year turns 19, old enough to die for her country, too young to get drunk doing it, who are we supposed to be?
I fell in love with Murakami when I read A Wild Sheep Chase in 10th grade. I liked his writing, liked his world, liked the direct and vital sex (I was full of teenage hormones), but most of all I liked this one passage where the narrator is spending days in a hotel room watching an office across the street from his window. There’s guys typing, filing, printing, copying. There’s an office romance that never gets to the surface. It’s all terribly boring. It’s the realest thing in the world.
So even if you miss the ball drop it’s okay as long as you’re missing it because you’re stuck to a complicated, hard, breathing life. There will always be another New Year. There’s only one you.
Novel Count: 8,688
Currently Reading: Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami
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festive hearts wane
Ben Ditmars, Night Poems
and sink like tides of joy.
Livesay Writing 