Hi.
Coffee: Light Roast, Trader Joe’s Brand; my friend Z is staying at our apartment for a few days; he bought some coffee because he’d been using mine; I told him he’s always welcome to share because if you can’t share coffee, you can’t share much of anything; still, he bought it, so we shared this new coffee instead; thin like the first sheets of ice in winter; fills up your mouth and then your throat, hangs around in there, warming you up
Sometimes it’s hard to write the Coffee Log. 10:40pm, well past my bed-time on a work night, I’m only now sitting down to type this out. It’s been hard to write the Coffee Log today.
But don’t get the wrong assumptions – nothing’s happened, no tragedies. It was a fine day. A quite morning, friendly afternoon. And maybe that explains it – why it’s been so hard to get my fingers moving on the keyboard – because good, easy things are the toughest to write about. A cream-colored wallpaper, perfectly harmless, hard to pick apart with words.
It’s been five days now that I’ve been on an antidepressant. Welbutrin, specifically. That’s not enough time for the drug to do much (the psychiatrist said it takes at least three weeks) but you can’t help feeling hopeful when you make a change. I spent a couple hours cleaning all the clutter from my room, a couple more sitting by the window thinking about my thinking and wondering if it had changed. Mostly, I wanted to feel something other than that weekend pressure, the free-time skunk of not knowing what to do with myself that’s had me wrapped up for the past few months. Unfortunately, the feeling was still there.
I haven’t been writing much. On weekdays, I can ignore it, because I’m so caught up in my day-job, but as soon as Friday shakes itself over into six a.m. Saturday, I’m feeling lost and fed up when the words won’t come. They say you are only able to write yourself out of a writer’s block, but I’ve been writing, and I think this block is something else.
I spent twenty-nine years seeing myself as an author. In my mind, that meant getting away. A 1930’s expat drowning lonely in France, or someone caught in the in-between spots of cafes and train stations, never settled down. But to live that life you have to be willing to give up something, or have nothing in the first place to give. I work a nine-to-five job to make sure no-one I know has to pay for me, and to sometimes be able to pay for them. I want my bases covered. The ‘author’ in my head has never been me.
How do you write about a life you don’t love? That’s the kind of life most people are living. Low, mundane. I can’t speak for the desperate because I’ve never been it. I can’t speak for the wildly successful either. But everyday I talk to people with decent-paying jobs and lists of problems they’re just-able to cover, loving little of the middling moments, finding most of their joy in five-to-ten minutes of after-work wine sipping. We get along handsomely. It’s easy to see ourselves in each other.
I grew up in a small town that wasn’t small enough to be communal, but wasn’t big enough for opportunities. I moved a few towns over to a place with more money but the same in-the-middle-of-everything scenes. All my art is drawn here, simple, fine things with no color. Something that’s hard to hate but just as hard to love.
The weekend’s almost over. It’s 11:00 pm now. Tomorrow, I’ll jump the work-rhythms until I get to go home. At home, I’ll tidy up, cook dinner, maybe read a book. No time to think about all the books I’m not writing. Those thoughts can wait until the weekend.
Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller
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I like to prowl ordinary places
Charles Bukowski
and taste the people-
from a distance.
Livesay Writing 