To Be Exact About Her Life
On Sunday I saw a bad movie starring Brad Pitt. On Tuesday my big toe turned black from kicking the dirt-caked ball for my dog. Just now I was rooting around the internet, reading poems by a poet I’d never heard of after coming across a line I liked quoted by a musician I’d never heard of in Artforum. I read the poem from which this line was pulled, and then I read another poem, and then I read a short story—or, I skimmed the short story. At the end of the latter, I found the same line from the poem that was quoted in the magazine. I thought of how often I do this, recycle my one good line, use it in a poem, in prose, looking for the perfect place for it. I like mistakes, especially mistakes that look like my mistakes, like maybe I’m not all wrong for them.
Probably I am supposed to be writing about something, but I don’t know what, or I don’t know how to shrink it down to one quantifiable graspable thing. It is Friday and I have a long weekend of double shifts ahead of me. Maybe I haven’t read or thought or taken in enough this week, what with all the bad TV I’ve watched and the chairs I’ve sat in drinking beer and shoving ice cream into my boyfriend’s mustache.
We were at this well-lit beer boutique place a few blocks away and Dylan said, “I hate people that drink craft beer.” I said, “I hate people who take anything too seriously.” He said, “Yeah, I think that’s what I mean.” But then I wondered if that was true, if I’m a person who takes things seriously or not, and then I thought that maybe it’s that I hate it when people take themselves seriously, and not necessarily when they take a profession or hobby or type of alcohol seriously. I wondered if actually this was exactly my own problem—that I take being a writer too seriously and writing itself not seriously enough.
And I love to brag about how humble I am, how important I believe humility is in the creative process, and my undying devotion to the real even though all this shit is made up, every truth is a crafted thing. Except we really were walking around in the dusk and late summer last night and the deli’s huge marquee was strobing into the darkening air to the same beat as the police lights from the car parked across the street flashing obnoxiously on and on for no discernible reason. And I really did turn my head from them and I really did sip my first New York egg cream from a red and white striped straw and it really wasn’t that good.
Charles D’Ambrosio, writing about MFK Fisher: “…soon enough it was the language itself, and more specifically, the right she assumed to be exact about her life, that won me over completely.”
Louise Gluck: “It is true that there is not enough beauty in the world. / It is also true that I am not competent to restore it. / Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.”
Then there’s this Instagram post that Jia Tolentino wrote when she got married that I think about all the time: “I suddenly understood again that because of one person’s specificity my life had taken a sweeter shape than anything I had ever imagined.”
How it’s the details that make up the moments that make up a life. And it’s the details that are so unassuming and overlooked, a cracked egg in the carton, a swept floor, the last few sips of top shelf whisky I can’t sell and so drink myself. The banality of these images as they unfold and as I reproduce them now. And yet there is an insistent urgency here, the urgency of the self, a singular body moving through a world full of things and terror and things.
Things I Ate:
Charcuterie!
Leftover pasta smothered in butter and parmesan
Shake Shack milkshake
Cheetos and Flamin’ Hot Doritos, c/o my friend Sarah on a slow day at work