This a new kind of man, yeah? An e’er-do-well; is doing quite fine and doesn’t particularly care. Throws a lot of money around on drinks and hats, doesn’t own a button-up shirt. Is unashamed of hangovers and paunch. Thinks it might be pretty chill to get married. A new frontier of maximo relaximo.
A youthful, dopey thing that young dopes do is buy a typewriter under the pretense that they’re going to use it to write. Romantic notion, eh? Plopping this clackety thing on the kitchen table, jabbing out a draft, then harrowed pencil marks, then a new draft, and so on. It’s completely impossible to do this, of course. In my own young and dopey days I faced down a typewriter ribbon and wrote pages upon pages about the experience of writing on a typewriter. Writing on a typewriter is all one can think about when writing on a typewriter, so divorced is it from one’s ordinary mode of working, one’s fluent mode of thinking. Using a typewriter to bang out prose is a bad party. It’s talking about how wasted you are, and thinking you’re fascinating for doing so.
There are times I still bother to notice things. On this sleepy afternoon: the featheriness of the clouds, the grooves-and-gravel texture of my building’s rear façade, the hundred-year history of paint upon rust upon paint upon rust of the fire escape. Nothing interesting, I don’t mean to imply that any of these things are interesting. But now that my phone has displaced my physical surroundings as most-likely-to-be-viewed, I find that the act of noticing has joined the act of typing in its descent to the level of novelty. “Weird, I’m studying the texture of a wall,” I mention to myself, thereby lifting my focus from the wall to the act of noticing the wall, thereby sort-of killing the actuality of the wall itself. What is the texture of the wall? It’s a thing I’m supposed to congratulate myself for noticing. I will congratulate myself using my phone, make my congratulations public, make sure that people know I’m the kind of guy who notices a thing.
I’m very sad about this, of course, but it’s too late to pretend that typing on a typewriter is any kind of way to go through life, or that looking at clouds is anything other than a bad party.
I’ve forgotten that I can post from my phone, while I’m out and about, and later, when I’m on the road. So expect some posts…
Some good developments in my life lately that I’m reluctant to write about in too much detail, just because I don’t want to jinx them. But I’ll tell you this. The other night I ordered in Chinese takeout once more, and I got two vaguely encouraging fortunes. One said “you will achieve your aim if you keep working towards your goal.” okay, fair enough. The other said “your fondest dream will come true within the year.” whoa.
I know they’re just fortunes, but given that I had ordered the takeout simply because I couldn’t take time away from my 3-hour practice session to go shopping for food and cook, it seemed like a good omen.
I’m glad they are fixing shit so my street doesn’t explode, but man I can hardly wait for this ordeal to be over. (Taken with instagram)
This book appears to be about relatively obvious things. (Taken with instagram)
