It’s all about escaping, after a fashion. Where you hike worlds, I write them.
I am in Portland, now. I have moved out of Chicago, to my great sadness, leaving little behind but much in transit. I’ve landed in another shitty legal market—because there is no other type, at present. Fortunately, my water-treading work from Chicago continues. Even more fortunately, I’m not starting from scratch in Portland. Among other things, I am being graciously put up (and put up with) by one of my uncles, the youngest of my mother’s brothers. The brewer, the biker, the wilderness man. The guy who for fifteen or more consecutive years managed to ski every calendar month. To put it mildly, we have different points of view on the world.
He enjoys cooking. Not elaborate things—not like the Retarded Gluttony dinners of law school. But good food, easy to make and consume. He grows his own salad—lettuce, tomatoes, and all. Most of our encounters center around dinner, as he’s gone for most of the day and dinner is a several hour affair around here. I don’t know my uncle very well, so it’s an opportunity to begin to know him. I expect, though, that it will tell him more about me than it will me about him. He’s good like that, and hard to read.
Do you know my favorite part of finishing a good story? It’s the afterglow of the thing, where I sit back and review its structure—as if it were a highway or a river with tributaries, or a capillary system that splits and rejoins—and I wonder ‘What was happening over there, just outside of the frame?’
I haven’t posted in quite some time. I was never very good at updating generally, but I fell off the radar in the midst of trying to capture in prose my fleeting memories of Bhutan and how it is far more a magical kingdom than Disney can ever produce. I have a half-written post on my hard drive and a small notepad with tiny, cryptic notes on it that I haven’t looked at in some time, because I fear that they may no longer make sense to me. That the memories are lost in the morass of my head. I briefly revived this thing in an effort, last fall, to emulate Laura's diligence with her own blog, but that stopped, too.
I stopped posting for several reasons. Some conscious, some not. Some I may not even have figured out presently. I’ve never really been sure what to do with blogs, for one thing. It seems a bit vain to write purely about myself, about what I’ve been up to, about what I’m thinking. Stories about me are to be told in person, in the same way that photos of me are… well, honestly, not really to be taken. I’d rather be the man behind the curtain than the one in the limelight (spotlights, incidentally, are hot—and my distaste for heat is one of the more easily known things about me). I still don’t know what to do with a blog, but we’ll see how long this spate of posting goes.
For another thing, I fell out of the habit of writing. I’ve always been bad at writing during school—I wrote prolifically (well, for me, anyway) on vacations, or when I needed to escape a while in college (see my first statement to my uncle). I wrote easily a hundred thousand words, maybe two hundred thousand, while in DC—there’s a reason I considered that coffee shop mine. Law school arrived, and changed my thought processes. Not only did I not write during the school year, but I didn’t write during the summers because my jobs entailed writing, albeit of a different and less pleasure-driven sort. Instead, I took breaks with video games and photography and dancing. Writing grew to be hard. I’m trying to break out of that now. Again, we’ll see how it goes. This blog may just become a testament to my vignettes as I try to work myself up to something bigger, better, and maybe even publishable.
Finally, at some point along the way, I made the colossally stupid mistake of tying posting to job-seeking success. I decided—possibly when something successful looked imminent, as there were a few moments of false hope like that—that I would make my next post when I was sufficiently employed, to announce that fact. Most of you know me in person, so you’re probably thoroughly aware of my lack of permanent and sufficiently remunerative employment—I spent a year in Chicago treading water and being immensely, indescribably, incommunicably jealous of my friends who were smarter or worked harder or were in some other way better than me such that they ended up with jobs in law. I temped at a synagogue and crunched cases for a legal newspaper.
I’m still un(der)employed. But now I’m in Portland being so, with far more possibilities and far fewer friends. I have plenty of people helping me, or trying to, but know no one closer in age to me than my uncle, twenty-five years my senior. God bless the internet for connecting me to my friends from life-stages past—and similar thanks be that my uncle is connected enough to have it in his house. Limitless potential here, in theory. Just have to prune it down to the possible, and then to the actual.
Writing—storytelling, actually—is all about cutting. You choose where a story goes. You choose where the story focuses. With every word, you choose not to write a million other words; you choose not to describe a billion other scenes; you choose not to tell a trillion different stories. To tell a story, you have to destroy the chaos of probability and bring it down to the one you need to tell. The lie you weave in words and phrases to convey the truths you cannot speak plainly.
Those of you who’ve been to Portland—probably those of you who’ve even heard much about it—are aware of Powell’s Books. I’ve taken to referring to it, since I don’t know when, but not terribly recently, as Book Mecca. To go to Powell’s is to make a pilgrimage. It requires planning and supplies—or, at least, money. It’s impossible for me to go—no, not actually impossible, as I did it once—and walk out of the door without any new books. There were extenuating circumstances. I’ve been several times now in this run at living-in-Portland, and I am thus richer by some number of books.
I finished one of them today—The Quantum Thief. It was fantastic. A few twists that I did not see coming, which is somewhat rare. But it got me thinking (see the second random conversational outburst at my uncle, above) about writing again. I have many little projects, and several big ones. And, to be honest, they all terrify me about as much as being un(der)employed does. But there are fewer excuses for it. So, to get back into writing, because I have stories that need telling, endless possibilities that I need to pare down into elegant and ineluctable paths to the conclusion at which I hope to arrive, I’m going to try to resuscitate this thing.
I may write some essays, or at least essay-like meditations—possibilities there include self-control (or, at least, self-possession); silence, secrecy, and invisibility; or more links between law and storytelling. I might post updates about life in Portland, reflections on life in Chicago, and more of the now-ancient memories of Bhutan, but I don’t honestly know how much of that I will trust to the internet. I will, however, post excerpts and drafts of writing both for feedback and to have something to do with it.
Why do we lie to each other? Because the truth is so vast, so inaccessible, so incomprehensible that it cannot be communicated simply. Lies are easier to believe, easier to create, easier to exchange. Honesty’s easy, but may not get you anywhere; fiction’s where genius lies.
