an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass

in the beginning was the word

meditation on: genesis, shared interiority, and the close friends feature

It’s a strange thing that in our current moment, we have such easy access to audience—a surplus nearly. And a surplus of “writers,” it feels. Everyone has a Substack now, don’t they? I’ll admit I myself have called Substack The Odyssey Online of our twenties—you remember, the crowdsourced srat-saturated conglomerate of the 2010’s, where people wrote about the struggles of being too thin, too tri-delt, where every Young Life leader went online to admit that she, too—if you can believe it—struggled with her faith. She drank a Four Loco once, let stray the hand of a Connor or a Josh into her Abercrombie and Fitch shorts. 

I never did quite feel audience-focused in my own work. You’ll see writers often say to write for someone, whoever you’re speaking to in your mind, or whoever you wished were reading, or someone you entrust this sort of thing to. For myself that has always been no one and everyone. I’ve never really cared, I suppose. Whoever reads it, will. I take the same approach to my social media, which has for some time been public, private only intermittently to protect potential employers from seeing posts captioned things like “1 of 10 outfits so tiny they redirect your attention from my bald spot,” and “no guchi at all???” and to dissuade an ex-best friend from further cloning myself, until I decided so be it, in both circumstances. 

I also don’t utilize the close friends feature on Instagram, more out of laziness and terror at the thought of evaluating who I might admire e pluribus unum (and then the question becomes how many? 10? 20? 50?). I’ve been teased for it often, an “influencer gesture,” the feedback says, but to my mind really it’s that the experience of self is so inherently insular, I find such a thrill in sharing my insularity, bridging my interior to its exterior, allowing people to understand myself as a strange, unkempt being, just as they are, private account or otherwise. 

All to say, there’s not much I won’t post. My boobs, I suppose, but that’s more or less because they’re hard to get a picture of.

This glasnost mentality carries straight through to my writing approach. There’s very little mystery about it, very little filtered or kept close, except for names and the very raw feelings, and my own personal secrets, which are almost always romantic. I think, for whatever reason, I don’t really fear being known. Maybe the fear of being chronically unknown seems worse to me; I do fear more than pretty much anything the un-lived experience.

And yet I’ve hesitated for a long time to create something so aimless as a “personal blog,” which is what I suppose this is. My travel blogs of yore had some structure—they were mobile, observational, and the subject was always exterior, Greece, Italy, Australia, whatever it was. This feels more embarrassing than that, to write my fragile, directionless experience, my slew of failures and sporadic interests, my little humming mediocrity, always trying to write the unexceptional into something of grandeur. But that’s exactly the point, what you do to survive and create and move when your ankles are otherwise buried in the cement of being. You infuse your experience with observation and meaning and drama. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, etc. etc. (And you knew, didn’t you, that Joan Didion would make her way in here, you smelled it a mile away.) 

We hear so often in the world that a true writer is someone who dies without it, who could not go on if they could not write. This is dooming, false, a stupid thing to say. Many a writer can scroll Tik Tok instead, work, say, in Admissions, and survive. A writer is only someone who feels compelled to speak about something, and to think of how best to say it. I think they come to it in their own time. I think they do many other things besides. I think much of it lives inside their head and never makes it to paper, and I think just as much of it lives privately and embarrassingly in a sporadically-kept journal underneath a stack of unread hardcovers. A writer need not be an artist, or a person of great influence, or anything spectacular at all. It can be an erratic and deeply-feeling documentarian, with many other hobbies and obligations. That realization has been integral to understanding myself as someone who writes, who can be in company with that most serious of occupations: a “writer.” The pressure is off, boys, no canvas need be stretched to make a masterpiece, etc. Writing is only the practice of giving life its many names. The point, as I understand it now, is sharing, and understanding; that is all.

I’m grateful to those who have encouraged me in my interims, especially after the close of an indulgent travel journal that documented my fear of loneliness, uselessness, and aging more than anything actually Italian. My father once went insofar as to bribe me with $30/article to write my own life. A certain novelist and former boss once took me to Pastis to tell me, kindfully, to get it the fuck together, to acknowledge that to write is what I wanted. 

With that in mind, here goes, with little intention beyond forcing reflection, creating that grossest of all terms, “a practice,” and keeping myself off Candy Crush. I’ve decided to break things up, for now, into a meditation, a review, and a series of recommendations, because that’s how I intuitively categorize information.

review of: bright lights, big city

I want to begin by clearing up that I almost used this space to recommend this toothbrush which is rocking my entire fucking world. But instead I’m going to use it to briefly laud this absolutely douchey book I just read which has more cocaine than any other real substance to it, and yet! In the end I was tearfully reading the last few pages, walking through LaGuardia, manic pixie dreaming myself to hell in Terminal C. It’s about a lost and recently divorced 24-year-old fact-checker at presumably the New Yorker or some other prestigious something-or-other as he blasts himself off every weekend on cocaine and Tom Collins’s and into the arms of women all less satisfying than his model ex-wife. If McInerney wasn’t such a damn good writer I would have burnt the book for what it was, (“an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass” is actually how Michiko Kakutani described Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone in the New York Times, but that applies here also) but he slips in little phrases like “You keep expecting things to be solid, but they’re not,” the simplicity of which summed up how I’ve been feeling for, I don’t know, 2-3 years at this point. The whole ambling, juicy, stupid thing is in second person and I’ve heard on multiple occasions this book being credited as the only one to successfully pull off a second-person narrative. I agree.

recommendations:

This perfect piece of art at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. I have absolutely no notes about this except that I wish I could meet this kid and give them $200 for this.

• This Sven Wunder song, which has been mediating the onset of my very familiar fall melancholy.

• This perfect bag, which I got on miraculous sale, but still would have bought at its $300 price point for being 100% perfect.

• Abigail Street in none other than Cincinnati, Ohio, where I spent this weekend evaluating 17-year-olds’ sheaths of anime for “artistic merit.” Everything at this restaurant was so excellent I actually floated above my situation i.e. spending a Saturday night eating scallops in southern Ohio with my co-workers, one of whom noted it was so good “the Cincinnati gays are here.”

• This skin serum from Kate Somerville, which in a single day made me spectacularly less ugly and more luminous. The price tag is disgusting, but they’ll be having a sample sale here starting tomorrow, where I hope to God this will be listed.