It's warm today for the first time in ages—fifty degrees, and the sun feels like fire
on my skin once more. I went to the park today and watched the swans float weightless on
the pond, shining radiant in the sun while sheaves of ice melted on the far bank. The grass
is bare, brown, and matted -- the trees are stretching, nude and grey, toward the sky. Two
weeks ago the world was buried under snow and ice, white and dirty white and scattered
diffuse pallid white, and today vague greens sigh in their sleep, not quite yet awake, but
rousing. The people, the gulls, the geese, the squirrels, the turtles -- they all see the
sun, and they know. Spring is coming, color is coming, and warmth, and levity.
I brought F.C. to the park with me to reflect on it and to plumb it for usable sections in
my nebulous idea of a rewrite. What I found is that, no matter how stubbornly I said to the
contrary, the first several chapters were little more than memoir. True, there were sections
where I wrote things that were not said, or made up characters, or made things go not quite
the way they did in real life, and I thought that by making these superficial changes I was
making it into fiction. But recently I have been thinking on the difference between fiction
and lying.
It is true that the main thrust of the work is rooted in my personal experience . . . and that I want the piece to capture some kind of emotional truth of
that situation, and to try to make some sense of it in a cosmic way. I still believe that that
can be achieved most effectively through fiction -- I just need to rethink my definition of the
word. I think I need to remove the "reality" of the work, the things that are in there just because
they really happened. I need to stop rationalizing them by thinking that they simulate the randomness
and confusing nature of real life. I think that fiction is decidedly not like real life, because in
fiction, your details and your characters and your happenstances and your characters' reactions to
them are not random, but must all work together in a coherent way to propel the reader to the
emotional or philosophical or experiential apex of the work.
I think I need to strip down the entire situation to its emotional core, and then consider what
characters and what series of events and what setting and what details most coherently drive
the reader to that emotional truth, in a way that feels like epiphany. Perhaps I need to start
at the end, at the mountaintop with the vista, and work my way back to the bottom from there.
Or perhaps I need to build a solid foundation of characters and compile the story on top of that.
The only thing that I am certain of is that only I can answer these questions.
Sometimes I find it difficult to separate the work from my own emotional reaction to those events,
and sometimes I find it hard to write at all. Sometimes I wonder if I should just file this away
as a learning experience, and sometimes I'm convinced that I have to finish it and get it published
to really consider myself a writer. Sometimes I question what the hell I am doing with my life.
And sometimes the sun comes out, and it's warm, and I go to the park and see the spring in its
infancy, and I feel the chill shudder out of my heart, and I remember why things are worth doing.
* * *
I'm living in an apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn with one guy, two Marxist chicks, and three cats.
I came pretty close to getting a technical writing job but it fizzled out on me. I bought an
electric drum kit, so now I have drums, an electric piano, an acoustic guitar, an electric guitar,
an electric bass, two microphones, and a recording interface. It is a long-term goal of mine to
record and release an album of my own music, and I am making significant progress.
My days consist of waking up in the late morning, drinking coffee all day, playing music in my room,
chatting with my roommates, going to the gym, and staying up until 3 am. I have been on four dates
with a girl named _____, . . . She's funny, she's intelligent, she's fun, she's attractive, and she
doesn't take things too seriously.
She is not, however, the kind of person who wears her heart on her sleeve, as I am, and so she is
less willing than me to gush and to overanalyze our feelings together. . . . [S]he won't tell me if she likes me or not. As always with women I find her incredibly confusing,
and inspiring, and despairing, and lovely, and wrong for me, and perfect for me, and someone I
should dump, and someone I should hang onto for dear life, and off-putting, and in-pulling, and
mystic, and spiritual, and cosmic, and universal, and terrifying, and flooring, and humbling,
and fascinating, and, as always with women, my heart is in disarray, and there's nowhere else
I'd rather be.