Countdown to the California move: 7 days.
This will be my eighth move in a little over two years, but the biggest one by far. I have never moved across the country before. I moved over an ocean once, but it was only for six months and I hardly brought any possessions with me that time.
This time, a bunch of my furniture has been packed into a van and I'm expected to shimmy across the nation in hot pursuit. Meanwhile, I'm supposed to be editing a video for someone but my copy of Finalcut just crapped out and the install disks have been sent back to the family member from whence they came. This journal entry must be horribly boring; I don't mean to complain. But here I am, a week away from the biggest move of my life, and I can't even finish what needs to get finished. No closure for the mingarden. Only headaches and back to back episodes of "FBI Files' into the wee hours.
This morning I read Queenie's last two journal entries and I've been racking my brain ever since, trying to encapsulate my own methods for figuring out what I want out of life. I've always thought I wanted to be a writer, but I haven't been writing much lately. Every time I look at the stupid book I'm working on, I get depressed. This may just be because I'm currently reading 'Murphy,' by Beckett, and my prose is so feeble and green compared to his; it's silly to compare my writing to his, I know, but I can't help it. If I'm going to be a writer, I want to be a damn good one. I don't want to put more garbage out into the world, because there's enough of it already.
I think I read a lot because I'm trying to learn how to be good. I'm trying to learn how to communicate what I see and feel, but with that characteristic dollop of sad, twinkling humor; Beckett is so fucking funny, so tragic. Like Kafka. The great writers know how to communicate the accidental honesty of days, the mundane moments that add up to hilarity and destruction. If I could perform this neat literary destruction, self-destruction, that takes place in a single room with one window, one door, then I'll feel like I can show what I'm written to another human; for now, it hides in my laptop like an unfinished science project.
(Maybe I'm doomed to leave everything unfinished. Maybe that's what I really want, because it will mean that nothing ever has to end.)
This will be my eighth move in a little over two years, but the biggest one by far. I have never moved across the country before. I moved over an ocean once, but it was only for six months and I hardly brought any possessions with me that time.
This time, a bunch of my furniture has been packed into a van and I'm expected to shimmy across the nation in hot pursuit. Meanwhile, I'm supposed to be editing a video for someone but my copy of Finalcut just crapped out and the install disks have been sent back to the family member from whence they came. This journal entry must be horribly boring; I don't mean to complain. But here I am, a week away from the biggest move of my life, and I can't even finish what needs to get finished. No closure for the mingarden. Only headaches and back to back episodes of "FBI Files' into the wee hours.
This morning I read Queenie's last two journal entries and I've been racking my brain ever since, trying to encapsulate my own methods for figuring out what I want out of life. I've always thought I wanted to be a writer, but I haven't been writing much lately. Every time I look at the stupid book I'm working on, I get depressed. This may just be because I'm currently reading 'Murphy,' by Beckett, and my prose is so feeble and green compared to his; it's silly to compare my writing to his, I know, but I can't help it. If I'm going to be a writer, I want to be a damn good one. I don't want to put more garbage out into the world, because there's enough of it already.
I think I read a lot because I'm trying to learn how to be good. I'm trying to learn how to communicate what I see and feel, but with that characteristic dollop of sad, twinkling humor; Beckett is so fucking funny, so tragic. Like Kafka. The great writers know how to communicate the accidental honesty of days, the mundane moments that add up to hilarity and destruction. If I could perform this neat literary destruction, self-destruction, that takes place in a single room with one window, one door, then I'll feel like I can show what I'm written to another human; for now, it hides in my laptop like an unfinished science project.
(Maybe I'm doomed to leave everything unfinished. Maybe that's what I really want, because it will mean that nothing ever has to end.)
VIEW 4 of 4 COMMENTS
oh yeah!!! where in california? will you be able to come and visit me in SF when I'm LIVING THERE in august/september?