Shoutout

This post's occasion is graduation and the prod is Andy Jiang, but the body belongs to John Cheever:

"The parturition of a writer, I think, unlike that of a painter, does not display any interesting alliances to his writers. In the growth of a writer one finds nothing like the early Jackson Pollock copies of Sistine Chapel paintings with their interesting cross-references to Thomas Hart Benton. A writer can be seen clumsily learning to walk, to tie his necktie, to make love, and to eat his peas off a fork. He appears much alone and determined to instruct himself. Naive, provincial in my case, sometimes drunk, sometimes obtuse, almost always clumsy, even a selected display of one's early work will be a naked history of one's struggle to receive an education in economics and love."

Fuck, I'll comment on that later.

Old, But Integral

All lives follow their own curves. What we know is that they are bound by two minimums, when they begin and when they end. Each life follows a distinct trajectory, but as a rule they trend according to genre. For figure skaters and varsity cheerleaders, peaks can come tragically early. For intellectuals and world-movers, the rise can be much more excruciating, the fall more sedate. This can differ greatly, of course, even within subsets: Updike was our elder statesmen until his death, while Salinger could stand it no longer, and tacitly told us all to fuck off.

The plight of the young is the indeterminacy of this curve. Slopes change at will. Maximums can come at any time. You're meteoric until you aren't, rising until you fall. The job of the young is to live in the moment, the instantaneous derivative, never mind the regression, to hell with the model. To be young is to insist on being an outlier, and to bet the house, blindly, with full faith.

And I am very, very bad at being young.

Snowflake

Overfed on poetry. Thinking I have an elegance of line. Please forgive.

Ran five gasping, disjointed miles this morning. Winter finally came out of left field, about a week after I wore a T-shirt out. The cold is palpable, like sludge. Sinks into your joints, eats your lungs alive. And then after the first mile or so, everything is all right. The fiery little lump of your pounding heart sees you through to the end.

The Soho fashion-intern sample-runners think exercise is a Diet Coke for lunch. The Fifth Ave. Arkansan tourists think, Look at that dumpy boy churn his frozen legs so. They're all blurs. Passing incidents like fire hydrants and scaffolding. This is only the quadrillionth supplement to the heritage of New York travel writing. It could write itself just fine: people are a menagerie, two million individual little epic lives, et cetera.

Distance running demands a whole new bag of tricks, but technology is a derivation. Moisture-wicking insulating base layers, also known as skin. Shock-absorbing foot stabilizers, also known as ankles. Nature thinks our gadgetry old hat.

And what of you? Your ankles may be supremely fetching, but darling, There Is Nothing New Under the Sun. Only the forever-endless facets of the divine sepulcher.

Methadonical

My addictions of the year, in no particular descending order:

Coming to terms with being fabulous.
Carb-counting; I counted a lot of them.
Running like the wind in a box.
Books, words. Did you expect something different?
Writing somewhere else. Wouldn't you like to know.
People, because they're fascinating, even when they can't do math.
Being alone, because people bore me.
Rationing the truth.
Vaguely vetting vehement vocalizations.
Being a real fucker.
Being a gentleman.
Shedding these indoctrinated social proprieties.
Computing how we're made of nothing but.
Embracing the participle phrase as my unit of inquiry.
Shedding Victorian syntax as the ivy leaf sheds its heady dew at summer's daybreak.
Growing cold by burning old journals.
Staying warm by writing new ones.

Need to stop writing in the morning, on caffeine and bum knees.

Whippersnappy

I think I still have two or three readers left. Miss me? To be quite honest, these days I'm saving most of my syntactical butchery for something substantive, some kind of literary orgasm that will rock all your worlds any day now. That I haven't written in this space often has little to do with lacking time; I just watched Con Air, for chrissakes. It's like the process of composing sentences, arranging a bunch of dimly-chosen signifiers into some muddled scrawl of a sentence, is physically taxing. "Want to go to the gym?" "Nah, can't bro, I just wrote."

I'll never understand my peers who can rattle off stories and poems just like that. I don't know that I've written a sentence worthy of an email, much less pieces of paper with ink and bindings and junk. Who of us in our proto-twenties can claim to having things worth saying, or the heady creative fiber to say them well? You're writing a memoir, you say? Your magnum opus? How big of you. You must be a genius. Or an ass.

I would be mortified if my thoughts from just a year ago had made it to print; that they remain on this blog is a terrifying notion, preserved only out of sentiment for the three or four decent bits of prose and a healthy fear of Alzheimer's. Perhaps I'm being overly defensive, perhaps not. Creative modesty is an act of temperance. The timid go unheard. Only cocks are cocky.