I guess nobody has ideas for me, and I probably shouldn’t have asked. It reminds me of an artist I read of once, a New York artist of the eighties, whose schtick was this: he put two ads in the Village Voice, one calling for artists who could generate ideas for artworks, and another for artists to execute others’ ideas. He hired a bunch of starving artists at minimum wage and set up a factory, then signed the results, and that was his art. He was quite succesful, though loathed by many. Anyway, if there are any bloggers out there capable of working up others’ ideas into ripping blog entries, please get in touch...
In the last entry I wanted to write a little about what fiction I’m working on, but the topic kept dropping out as I wrote, so I’ll put it in a blog entry of its own.
In November I worked dilligently if unsuccesfully on my novel. I don’t like to describe the plots of things I’m working on – I find it kills the idea – so I’ll just say it’s an apocalyptic novel. While others were trying hard to turn out 50,000 words of stream-of-conciousness blather for the ridiculous
NANOWRIMO, I was trying, simply, to come up with a voice for my book. I wrote certain paragraphs, then re-wrote them, a number of times. Eventually these paragraphs would become so dressed up with subclauses and clever verbiage that I would abandon them and find some other passage to play with. I even wrote a couple of pages of actual novel, although they weren’t any good. I told myself that I was trying to decide whether the book should be in first or third person, which is not something that should really take a month – and anyway, everything I wrote was first person. I wanted to write it in first person, because first person is so much easier – for me, and I think for most people. I can create some slightly altered alter-ego and let him talk, more or less as I would myself. I can insert my own caustic observations and humour whenever things get a little slow.
I think I secretly knew all along that the novel should be in third person. In December I stopped writing it. I felt bad about stopping, but I think now it was probably necessary. I’ll go back to it eventually.
After that I just wrote blog entries, which as I mentioned in the last entry turned out to be the best thing for me. Then, in the last few weeks, with my interest in fiction revived, I went back and looked at some things saved on my computer. The first thing I looked at was my novel attempts, which seemed, with a month’s distance, to be pretty abysmal. Then I found a couple of short stories – ideas I’ve had for a long time, four years in one instance, five in the other – that I have worked on, over the years, very occasionally and with limited success, but which are still in some way alive for me.
I’m not good with short stories. In truth I haven’t finished one in about eight years. I have written two full-length manuscripts in that time, so it’s not laziness (although as I write that, it doesn't seem such an amazing achievement; certainly I should have written more); I don’t think I’m well-suited to the form. My short stories tend to either remain unfinished, or turn into novels. But I’d like to write a short story now, if only because it would be nice to complete a new piece of fiction, whatever the length, and shorter is easier than longer.
One of the short stories is very important to me, still hopelessly vague in conception, something I only work on when intoxicated, and quite likely to turn into a novel, if I ever get a grip on it. I’m leaving that one alone for the moment.
The other is what I think of as my Professional Short Story, and that’s what I’ve been working on. It is not particularly important to me, nor particularly brilliant in concept – it’s one of those epiphany sorts of short stories, like something from the New Yorker in the fifties. And that’s how I want to write it: with that sort of sinewy prose that some of the American writers of that time had, tough in its nouns and verbs and elegant in its punctuation and grammar and sentence construction. Tight. It is not in danger of turning into a novel, and probably in little danger of turning into a story that will change the world, but it is a serviceable idea that I would like very much to turn into a well-crafted short story.
It hasn’t been going too great so far; it hasn’t been as well-written as some of the things on my blog, and I’m not too inspired to write it, although that’s kind of the point. Instead of nouns and verbs I’m getting convoluted sentences, a general dullness, and innapropriate oratorical flourishes.
Last night after another not-too-succesful session with this story, I got out my copy of Salinger’s
Franny and Zooey. This is something I do a lot when I’m writing, re-read stuff that seems close to what I’m trying to do, to see how others have done it. I should say, not out of brag, but because it’s slightly important to the anecdote, and because I am a trained bookseller, that I have a reasonably nice copy of this book – the second British edition, in a good dustjacket (parenthetically, I’d like to say that I think first editions are a bit stupid, particularly if so valuable and pristine that they can’t be read, but there
is something nice about having a contemporary hardcover edition of a book you like, and when I find these, I tend to keep them.) Anyway I got this book off my bookshelf in order to be instructed by old JD. Like a lot of people, I was hugely enamoured of him between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, and he’s probably still the biggest influence on my style. These days I’d admit that some of his ideas are a little sophomoric, but I still love the way he writes. So I opened this nice copy of a great book, and the first thing I read was the front flap, which had a brief introduction by JD Salinger. He was talking about the Glass stories, and he said something in it that perfectly stated how I’m feeling about my own writing, which I’d like to put down here. I could have stopped there, I suppose, but I did re-read "Franny", and it was helpful – I realized how economical his sentences are, how they tend to be simultaneously elegant, and well-observed, and revealing with regards to character. So that’s something for me to attempt, if not achieve, when I next try to write my Professional Short Story. Thanks, JD, for both things.
It is a long-term project, patently an ambitious one, and there is a real-enough danger, I suppose, that sooner or later I’ll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I’m very hopeful.
I have acquired a good habit. Each night at around ten o’clock I stop what I'm doing and go up to the roof for a swim. It is quiet up there at that time of night. If there are no people, and there are usually no people, I can switch the lights off and swim in the darkness and the quiet, and the only sounds are my splashes. I swim up the lap pool and to my left I can see, through two sets of windows, the large Rydges sign on the roof of the motel next to my building, glowing its fluorescent blue-white light; on my return trip down the pool I can see the small lights atop the poles on the childproof perspex fencing that surrounds the deck and the pool; beyond that, the skyline of the city. It feels good, to exercise in the only way I really enjoy. I relax and I think about writing; when I am done, I come back down to my place, procrastinate for a while, then I put on some music and try to write.
The roof closes at ten-thirty, so by ten the apartment dwellers have usually sealed themselves off in their boxy apartments. It is not so pleasant to swim at other times. The gym upstairs makes this building appealing to apartment-hunting jocks, and frequently they are up there, calling each other mate and engaging in mating rituals in the pool with their raspy-voiced girlfriends. This makes me uncomfortable. The pool is a lap pool, one lane, long, thin and shallow, it is no fun to get in with them and try to swim around their antics, averting my eyes all the while. Sometimes, if they’re there, I will sit on the deck and wait for them to finish up, hating them all the while, but they tend to take their time. They like to show off to their girlfriends by picking them up and upturning them in the water. Their girlfriends squeel and submit. I get irritated and give up on the idea of swimming.
Very occasionally they are still there at night. When this happens I get frustrated, and come back to my place, and don’t write. But it’s unusual. There is one other guy who goes up at around the same time I do. He’s OK, he’s there at that time for the same reasons I am, we leave each other alone. My only problem with him is that he likes to swim with the lights on, while I like them off. But we have an informal, unstated arrangement – whoever gets their first gets to decide the lighting. We nod hello and don’t bother each other, swimming our laps in opposite directions and sticking to our own side of the pool, passing each other, like – I know this is cliché, but so appropriate that I don’t feel inclined to look for an original replacement – ships in the night.
*
I didn’t get to swim tonight. I rushed Bess off the phone at ten o’clock, talking about the importance of my swim. I went upstairs, I opened the door to rowdy voices and a Bacchinalian scene; I retreated hastily, went downstairs again, and had a shower instead. It wasn’t the same, I wanted the rhythm and the suspension from gravity. But I’ll try to finish this off anyway. I wrote most of this last night, but I told myself I’d post a blog entry tonight, and giving myself excuses to not write isn't a good idea.
I’ve been happy with a couple of the things I’ve posted on here lately. These blog resolutions have been good for me. The simple discipline of making myself write regularly, and trying to write well; of drafting, of discovering and re-discovering what I know how to do, what I can make work, what feels like me. The effort at a sort of honesty, and it’s something deeper than just personal revelation and what I’m willing to share about myself; it’s about creating something that feels like an extension of myself. The way that images and well-structured sentences can have a cumulative effect which adds depth and resonance. Nouns and verbs in well-chosen combination. I don’t know how I forgot some of these things, but I did, and they were gone a long time.
There is a me that feels like me. When I write well I feel more like myself. I feel more confident, and I’m less concerned with the opinions of others, but it’s more than that. I see things more clearly, the colours are brighter. No, that’s not it. I have the gaze of a veteran hunter? My humours are in alignment? Every metaphor seems wildly wrong. There is a me that feels like me, that’s as good as I can put it. It’s the me of the previous blog entry – the six year old kid on the beach. It’s the me that wrote a novel which, despite its flaws (and I know those flaws better than anybody else), had some sort of truth and individuality about it.
I’ve been enjoying writing this blog lately, but it is hard for me to come up with new ideas for blog entries. This individual perspective makes me less inclined to write about world events, and I’m still not that inclined to write incidents on my blog, the sort of things I tell people when they ask what I’ve been up to. I want to write things that have some sort of coherence and depth and through-line to them. Unfortunately, or fortunately, it’s not every day that I smash my car up or go on a Sudafed binge...
I feel a stronger pull towards fiction now than I have in a long time – these techniques I’ve been trying out on here, they’re really fictional techniques. I can apply them to autobiography, but they don’t work for everything. What I’m writing now, for instance – I don’t know how to make it imagistic, it is by necessity expository, and that makes it less fun. I am trying to write fiction (after I swim, of course, when I’m not writing blog entries), but I do want to keep this up, this different sort of blogging.
So I’ll ask people to offer some suggestions. Ask and I’ll write a blog entry about it. I don’t promise that it will be a long blog entry, or even that I’ll actually put it up here, but I’ll attempt any considered suggestion, although possibly in a not-too-literal fashion. But only individualistic themes, please, I really don’t want to write about George W Bush’s state of the union – yeah, I found it as annoying as you did, what else is there to say? Give me something imaginative, or associative, or ask me a personal question and watch me write right around the point. But somebody suggest something - it’s easier for me to come up with a topic if I have some sort of restriction or boundary, the possibilities are too large otherwise.
In the summer of 1982/83, when I was six years old, my family moved from the mountains to Austinmer. We moved in my father’s blue van – my mother, my father, my younger brother, me, and our cattle dog Daisy. Sometime later that summer my father traded in the blue van for a mustard campervan. Supposedly the family was going to travel around Australia, me and my brother being home-schooled by my father.
The place at Austinmer was my grandmother’s – a weatherboard miner’s cottage on a cliff high above a rocky beach and the ocean. It was meant to be a temporary stopping point.
It was warm, that summer. Every day was bright sunshine. The miner’s cottage only had one real bedroom – a dark, scary bedroom next to the highway, decorated in maroon décor. My grandmother claimed it was inhabited by a ghost called Emily. Nobody wanted to sleep in it.
That was the summer I became a beach bum. I went to the beach every day, I turned brown and my hair turned even whiter than it already was.
It was a summer of visits from family friends, and lots of kids. My older half-brother and half-sisters, my cousins, the Binns’ and their kids, and others. The Woods’ were there a long time, they were wealthy, their son, who was my age, often scared me – he could turn in an instant from friendly to psychotic. He had a lot of game n’ watches, I had a lot of game n’ watches, we decided to set up a stall on the front lawn selling turns at our game n’ watches for ten cents a go. Nobody paid for a go.
We had these freezable mug things you would put in the freezer, then pour softdrink into, and keep stirring until you had a slushy. We discovered that if you left your slushy in the freezer for a while, you could make a super-slushy. But we’d always forget about them, and find our slushy mugs days later, frozen solid.
My older half-brother came down and was always fixing his car in the driveway, there were parts all over the place.
I tried to learn to ride a bicycle – the training wheels came off my bike, my older brother took them off – somehow he got the chain off at the same time, so when I would try to peddle I’d go nowhere, and would fall off. This was, as you can imagine, unbelievably frustrating. I thought I was doing something wrong. (To my brother’s credit, he also fixed it when he discovered what had happened.)
I still had this plastic, blue injection molded tricycle with bright yellow wheels, though, and I’d ride it down the hill to the beach, because I could lift up my feet and just fly. Then I’d hang around on the beach until somebody with a car – my older brother or my father – would take it back for me. Pushing it back up the hill was no fun at all.
So many kids were staying there that at one point they were sleeping crosswise in this long, thin laundry at the back of the house.
I had a clown with a clown hat that you could hook up to a hose. A jet of water would shoot out of the clown’s head and the hat would balance atop the jet of water, if you got the water speed right. I would sit under it on the lawn, overlooking the ocean. I also had one of those bouncy ball creatures whose horns were handles that you could bounce around on.
We saw dolphins, a rescue at sea, and a man dragging ashore a shark he had spearfished, from the window in the kitchen.
At the beach I had a bucket and a small net, and my pastime was catching the tiny fish that lived in the rockpools, and putting them in the bucket. At the end of the day I would let them go. I got good at this – the fish were fleet, but I learned how to create a disturbance and rush them into my net. I also caught little crabs and put them into my bucket.
One day I was trying to coax a crab from a crevice with a paddle-pop stick. Some older boys came along and asked me what I was doing, and I explained. They took the paddle-pop stick from me and shoved it violently into the hole, spearing the crab. They pulled the crab from the hole, impaled on the paddle-pop stick, and dropped it on the rocks. I can still remember the way its claws closed around the paddle-pop stick as it died.
My father made one attempt to home-school me, he gave me an encyclopedia entry on Captain Cook and told me to copy it out. It was, I think, the single most boring school lesson I have ever endured. I sat in the kitchen, doodling, and looked at the ocean.
My cousin and I dug pools for ourselves on the beach, down by the water, and sat in them. I came up with this idea – our pools would have a control panel that controlled the temperature. We drew control panels in the sand, and pressed imaginary buttons to make the water warmer. The water… got… warmer. It freaked us out. It was the first time I’d encountered the power of suggestion.
At one point, I want to say it was at the end of summer, I got sad. It was the first time I’d ever gotten sad for no obvious reason, it confused me. Something chemical in me was changing.
My parents decided to stay, not to travel. It had been such a romantic summer, it had affected all of us. Of course, it was never the same again – sometime later we moved out of my grandmother’s cottage, I had to go to school, my parents seperated, and everything changed, as it does. Still, I remember that summer a lot. When my grandmother died, my father bought the cottage, rebuilt the house, and that’s where I go to, when I go to Austinmer.
I got a haircut today from Oly, the Iranian hairdresser. I got it cut short. At first it seemed OK, but after a while I had to face it: Oly gave me a flat-top. That haircut from the eighties. I suppose it will grow out soon, but at the moment I look like a wimpy-ass white boy rapper. Like, if a director of a Vanilla Ice film-clip was looking for somebody who looked lamer than Vanilla Ice, for Vanilla Ice to defeat in a rap battle, they’d cast me. Ah, it’s not Oly’s fault, he’s a good hairdresser, but he has nothing to work with. I always get this feeling of disapointment from him when he’s done and looks at the results. He tries to crimp some life into my hair, looks at the results in the mirror, sighs.
I like Oly, though, he’s a sensitive soul, and a gay Muslim Iranian refugee hairdresser, which must be a hard role for life to assign you. I was one of his first customers; he struggles along in a back-street. I can ask him questions I could ask no other hairdresser, like, what happens to all the hair clippings? Apparently they just go into ordinary rubbish. I thought maybe they used them to stuff toy animals, or make glue, or something, it seems like a material that should have some industrial use.
I found it strange to stare at myself in a well-lit mirror for fifteen or twenty minutes, I never do it at any other time. The planes of my face seemed increasingly peculiar to me the longer I looked at them. But I bring so much baggage to my reflection that it is hard for me to know what I’m really looking at. And of course in a mirror you can never see yourself looking away…
I worry sometimes what my face is becoming as I get older, if I am starting to look haunted, if things are starting to show in my countenance that make people wary of me. At a pub last weekend I tried talking to people I didn't know, or only half-knew. I was part-drunk, I was trying to be charming but spoke too fast and unclearly, like an unfunny Robin Williams, nobody could understand me. The music was too loud. I sensed an unwillingness to engage, a turning away, and I wondered if it was me. It reminded me of the worst couple of years of high school, this blank inpenetrable wall coming back at me from people. I'm not so bad, I wanted to tell people – away from all this noise I’m better. Alone I’m slower, I listen well; I’m not as desperate as I may seem, I have friends, it's just that I miss the allure of a fascinating stranger.
What can you do? I talked to friends, instead; it was easier, and no doubt they were a lot more interesting than anything those strangers might have had to offer. And I got a haircut. Look where that got me. Ice Ice Baby.
RIP Annoying Customers blog.
It was fun for a while, and felt psychologically good for me at the time, but ultimately was so unrelentingly negative that I didn't want to do it any more. That's a side to my personality, but only one side, and I want to move away from that sort of thinking. Thanks to those who contributed.
I cleaned out shelves in my storage unit and in my home so I would have room for my books. At the storage place I sat and had a cigarette and watched a woman go through boxes of photographs, all still in those sleeves they come in when you pick them up. She would take an envelope from her box, look at the first couple of photographs, then toss the package in the dumpster. I watched more TV series on DVD, the curtains drawn: Deadwood was pretty good; Six Feet Under, eh, I couldn’t get into it. I didn't tell people I was back in the city. I went back to work and the internet wasn't working, I asked the people upstairs what the story was. "It does not work," they confirmed. "The landlord say they change to new plan," they told me, in broken English. "When's all this happening?" "Ah..." They sought the expression they were looking for, found it, smiled, and carefully enunciated, "Sooner or later." I couldn't do any work, so I played Free Cell and started to fancy myself skilled at it. I checked my win percentage, it was high.
A regular customer came in - nice guy. "Happy new year!" he said.
"Not so far," I grumbled.
"It's only day two," he said. "
There's still hope."I have a lot of hope for this new year. My new year really starts in May, but it would be nice to arrive at that point sane, healthy, creative, and connected with people. I did make new year's resolutions, none too clearly defined: a nexus of things to do with taking care of myself on a large scale by doing so on a small scale. Looking after my health, making my hovel livable, avoiding needless negativity, and the like. Still, by day two of the new year, things were already starting to look like 2006 redux, so I decided that day three would be a new start.
On day three I got a cold. A person lacking my particular fortitude might have given up at this point; instead, I decided, once again, to quit smoking. Quiting smoking wasn’t on my list of new year’s resolutions, but it was sort of covered under other headings and categories. With a cold there was nothing much else I could productively do, and besides, it made a certain amount of sense. My logic was that I rarely feel much like smoking when I have a cold, and, also, I could take day and night cold and flu tablets, and sleep a lot. I thought of all the good and valid reasons why I should give up smoking and disregarded them, seizing instead on a trivial and self-concious reason: I’d told everybody ages ago that I was going to quit, and had failed at it completely. I don’t think anybody particularly cared (oh, I suppose my parents probably did), but it made me feel like a failure. There are many things that make me feel like a failure; in some ways, this was the easiest thing to address. It was the only thing I could deal with through pure laziness; it was the only one that called on me do to absolutely nothing at all; it was defined by its inactivity.
I bought a pack of day and night cold and flu tablets. The big pack, the family pack. I immediately disregarded the manufacturers’ instructions and prepared myself a Sudafed speedball: two daytime tablets to knock out the symptoms of a cold and the nicotine withdrawl, and a nighttime tablet to take the edge off things and give me a buzz. I’ve always been quite susceptible to the effects of antihistaminy drugs. I used to get hayfever when I was a kid – I never get it anymore – and I’d take these deadly little red pills called Polaramine, which would send me off into space, and usually to sleep. I don’t think they make them any more. Anyway, nighttime cold and flu tablets during the day are fun. I finished my last cigarette and settled down on my couch with Six Feet Under: several seasons worth.
It was suprisingly pleasant. I felt freed of all responsibility; whenever the nicotine withdrawal started to get too bad, I would throw another cold and flu tablet into the mix, a day or a night one, depending on my mood. I started to zone out, so I listened to music instead.
Things get a little vague after this. Several days passed. I didn’t smoke cigarettes, and took an awful lot of cold and flu tablets. I took so many I wasn’t sure, anymore, whether I still had a cold or not. I made sure to eat, worried about the effect of so much paracetomol on my stomach. I began to map out a self-help book in my head: Nicholas Carvan’s Even Easier Way To Quit Smoking. My book would be lighter on the cognitive behavioural therapy than Alan Carr’s, but would be easier, and generally more fun. It would prescribe TV series on DVD and over-the-counter cold and flu remedies taken irresponsibly. It would be next to Alan Carr’s book, alphabetically, and would appeal by being thinner.
The lack of nicotine added a strange dissociative effect to my generally hazy state. I went to work and played Free Cell in my haze; my win percentage plummeted. At night I watched Six Feet Under. I was doing the same things I was doing at the start of the year, but now they were heroic, because I was doing them as distraction while not smoking. Courtney visited me at work, we sat on the steps in front of the shop and King Street seemed desaturated in colour, the sounds distant; there was a ringing in my ears. I talked a softly spoken staccato patter at her, rubbish about Sudafed and Free Cell, how I was a world champion Free Cell player, she found it amusing. I went out with some friends, drinking was a bad idea, I was cranky, I just wanted to go home, take a nighttime cold and flu tablet, and watch Six Feet Under. I was up to season four.
I went to bed at some point. I wasn’t feeling so good. Too many daytime tablets, not enough nighttime ones. I might have had a bit of a fever. I drifted; I saw insights into the nature of human relationships, and how they were just like Free Cell. I was playing Free Cell and the cards were people I knew. I saw how some people attached to others in big long lines, and they could be moved about, and if you did it right, people revealed themselves, hiding under other cards, other people...
I woke up at five in the morning and felt like death. A suicidal claustrophobia, more horrible than anything I’ve felt in a long time. I may have been feverish, because I was shivering, my quilt wasn’t warm enough, and it’s summer and generally hot in my bedroom. No doubt the sudafed binge hadn’t helped matters. But the last time I felt like this was the last time I tried to quit smoking, and it was what caused me to give up trying to quit, so I think that’s probably most of it.
I felt like there was no way out, nothing I could do; like I was thirty and my youth was gone, nothing accomplished, every day the same. In my half-conscious state I gave a huge myoclonic jerk and yelled something so loud the neighbours might have heard it; I don’t know what it was. I think it might have been help me.
I tried to breathe slowly; I tried to think rationally. There were plenty of ways out and a million paths my life might take. Objectively, I might have reason to be a little frustrated at the moment, but I had nothing to feel desperate or suicidal about. I got up, wished I had some cigarettes. I would have smoked them, if I’d had them, but I didn’t, so I just checked my email and went back to bed.
I haven’t wanted to smoke too much since then. Let’s withhold the congratulations, shall we, for a while yet, until we see if it sticks. Last time I wrote about this topic I got all this well-meaning advice that just made me feel shittier when I eventually relapsed, and I’m not promising a damn thing. But I feel OK. And I’ve mostly stopped with the cold and flu tablets. I guess this is the sort of entry I used to not post.
