Morning: Hunger
It’s early. The sky is starting to show the first pinks of light. My view of the horizon is blocked by trees and I’m tempted to run out to a field where I can see all the colors of dawn. I’m hungry – enough so that my stomach feels…. I can’t figure out how to describe the feeling – it’s not quite pain, but it is discomfort. It occurs to me that I’ve never really felt the pain of long hunger… that I’ve always been able to access food when I was hungry. I lift my arm and feel a pinch in my shoulder. This happens a lot. The pinks and oranges are draining, muted. I have a pain in my teeth when I drink hot or cold liquids. The coffee is hot from the pot. Is this what morning is? Waking to various hungers and shoots of nagging pains? When my alarm went off, I thought of the workday ahead. I reminded myself of something a poet had written, she never worked an interesting job because she knew it would interfere with her writing. Someone has turned the volume back up on the horizon. I made some breakfast and can remember a woman with whom I lived – she needed to wait to eat and I liked to eat right away. Our differences began at breakfast – which feels like an epiphany for why it didn’t work and also the start of a poem or story – a hell of a declarative statement. I’ve decided I’m going to work from home today. I’m thinking of moving without the security of having another job. Could I offer a year’s rent and see how it goes? The pain in my stomach has gone. I sometimes think I’m the outlier of the family. Everyone else has been traditional. Married. Kids. Steady jobs. Mostly one career types. Make money. Go on vacations. Look to buy a second home. What do they think about when they wake up? Do any of them dream of starting over? How does their hunger hit them? I don’t have the language to describe the soft yellow outside my window. Quickly it’s gone. Forty minutes have passed. I hate looking at the clock. Soon I’ll have to feed the dog. Then a walk. I’ve barely gotten started. I talked to my dad about quitting my job. He seemed resigned. “Do what you have to do.” If I could find ways to feed these parts of me, the parts that remind me I’m alone and pressed for time, I would. Last night I looked at some poems I had written. I was unhappy with everything. Unhappy with my output. Unhappy with my lack of imagery and feeling. Unhappy with my inability to land a gut punch or even a clever turn. And this is what I would quit for? I sometimes try to do the math. It shouldn’t be hard to earn $200+ a day – which is about what I earn now. But the added costs… I have my healthcare paid for. I’ve been on the healthcare market before it sucks and is expensive. I have a spreadsheet for this…. Maybe I’ll go there later. I’m the outlier of the family. I’m willing to bet I’m the only one who thinks about how he might live on as little income as possible to have as much other freedoms as possible. I worry this would be disastrous for my romantic life – an unemployed writer. I might look up short term rentals in other cities – just to test things out. I’m living in some fantasy world. A tortured writer who isn’t very good.
Noon: Work
By 7 am I had set the fantasies and hungers aside and started working – my actual work. The thoughts lingered. Yesterday I finished reading Mary Oliver’s instructional book on writing poetry. She’s the one who wouldn’t take an interesting job for fear it would interfere with her writing. She also said that one could learn to live on about what it takes to keep a chicken alive. For the first time, the average rent in America has gone above $2,000 a month. Keeping a chicken alive has gotten expensive. At some point I logged into LinkedIn, one of the headlines read.. something something something predict recession. I got pissed. I felt trapped. Even if I wanted to take a break and focus on travel and writing, only an idiot does that as a recession approaches. During lunch I watched John Oliver. His main focus was on rent. He played a clip of a corporate jerk basically telling his shareholders that the market is tight and they can raise market rates. They’re intentionally squeezing more out of people simply because they can. This is infuriating. In my head I started a nonprofit called FMR Capital. FMR stands for fuck market rates. It would be a collaborative of landlords who don’t follow market rates “just because they can” – maybe they could get some type of subsidies for being decent human beings and not playing monopoly with a basic human right. But even that thinking is misguided – it plays by the rules already in place which are the rules that are squeezing people out of places to live. I started and abandoned a post titled “Why I hate America.” I thought I’m pissed enough, I should go work for an organization that wants to tear the whole thing down and level the playing field. But then I’d be working an interesting job and wouldn’t have time to write.
Night: Old Posts
I sometimes see a ping on an old post or page and will go back to re-read what I wrote. Tonight I went back to some posts from late 2020. I read quite a few of them. I didn’t hate them. I had just moved here. The weather was gray and the holidays were approaching. I had a sweet post about Nick the cat. I miss him. Earlier tonight I was walking the dog and we passed a cat who was old and shaky in her movements. I thought of Nick in his final weeks. I felt bad and sad for both of them (this old cat and Nick). I looked at the dog and thought about what a terror he might be to the weak and frail and I really didn’t like him in that moment. I didn’t like imagining what he might do given the chance. I read a few more posts from October and November. Then I started at the very beginning.
I was expecting to be embarrassed by my earliest efforts here. I was expecting them to be shamelessly veiled attempts to communicate with my ex. I was expecting to cringe over lots of longing and pining – saccharine heart-song of a wayward teen. I sometimes cringe when I look at old poems – like I want to crawl up my own butthole and hide – that’s what I was expecting. I only read my first 10 or 15 posts – September of 2019. I didn’t want to hide. They were honest attempts at understanding where I was and how I had gotten there. There was some longing and pining for sure – both for the love I had lost and the home I was leaving. I tried to look at those posts the way a new partner might see them… They weren’t things I would be embarrassed to share.
I sometimes feel a little weird re-reading things I’ve written. Like, am I that in love with my own voice? I remember years ago having drinks with a group of students and the poet Billy Collins. He told us that he doesn’t revise – or at least that’s what I think he said – and there could be a whole lot of nuance in the definition of revise. Mary Oliver says she might make fifty revisions of a poem before she’s done with it. I don’t feel quite so bad about going back to revisit some old writing.