This morning's writing

Lennon wasn’t so much planned as envisioned. They weren’t sure they wanted kids, but they both had their slight percentages of desire, the slivers of what-if. Gary was less vocal about it – because he was Gary – but still he would express the desire to do the things with his boy that you do with your boy, the basketball and football and music classes and whatnot. Ruth was never sure whether to expect a boy or girl or simply a dream unfulfilled, but it never stopped her from spinning it out in ideas and stories and thoughts.

The kid will be our kid and you know what that means. They won’t be able to put one foot in front of the other without tripping. They won’t be able to reach the top shelf without a stepladder. Clumsy midgets. This is why we can’t have kids.

Ruth called it her two percent. Gary’s margin was far slimmer. Most days it seemed that Lennon would not win the race to becoming. Instead they went to bars where drinks were alchemized into action, infused with needle droppers, offered with instructions. They threw down fifty, seventy-five at a time and walked away sober. They booked trips: Tokyo, Toulouse, Costa Rica. They gathered ink inside their passports and snatches of foreign languages in their vocabulary.

They adopted a cat. She lasted four months before running away, getting hit by a car, dying. They took this as a sign.

Lately

Today's writing

He still worked at PharmaCorp where they had met all those years ago. Still in Quality Assurance, still signing documentation, still kind-of wishing he could use his graduate degree in statistics but mostly just glad he worked only a brief bike ride from home. Laid back, was Gary. Everyone said so. Everyone liked him. Few people knew him. He was quick to talk, reluctant to reveal. She was the oversharer of the couple and sometimes she found herself babbling at parties, going off in an embarrassing manner, catching her conversation partner’s glance and realizing she was saying too much, too quickly, with too much sweat beading her brow. She always vowed she wasn’t going to do it again, a promise that lasted as long as the next time took to arrive.

Lennon settled on the couch, butt up in the air, and passed back out. “Relax,” Gary said when Ruth sighed. “It’s not like you don’t have, I don’t know, an hour.”

Is there anything less relaxing than being told to relax? Some things you cannot command, and relaxation sits atop that list. It either exists or it does not. And so Ruth crossed her legs underneath herself, chewed on her bottom lip, and took a moment to wish hateful shit on her husband.

Into the Mystic

Whenever I hear this Van Morrison song, I think of Adam.

Man, I fell in love with him so long ago. We were strangers, and then we were friends, and then we were more, and he had his arm around me at the Kerry House, and we were kissing on a street bench a few hours later, and it all fell down around us.

A heartbreaking Modern Love

"All winter, spring and into the summer, we had auditioned, my girls and I, and when in August he drove away and out of our lives, I took to asking the nanny to work extra hours, to return after she had finished dinner with her family, just so I could drive from one exit of the 826 to another, in search of him."

This one got to me.

"We have fire everywhere"

Some amazing writing in this New York Times piece on the Paradise fires last fall. Particularly notable:

"It was all more evidence that the natural world was warping, outpacing our capacity to prepare for, or even conceive of, the magnitude of disaster that such a disordered earth can produce. We live with an unspoken assumption that the planet is generally survivable, that its tantrums are infrequent and, while menacing, can be plotted along some hazy, existentially tolerable bell curve. But the stability that American society was built around for generations appears to be eroding. That stability was always an illusion; wherever you live, you live with risk — just at some emotional and cognitive remove. Now, those risks are ratcheting up. Nature is increasingly finding a foothold in the unimaginable: what’s not just unprecedented but also hopelessly far beyond what we’ve seen. This is a realm beyond disaster, where catastrophes live. Fisher wasn’t just trapped in a fire; she was trapped in the 21st century."

Damn. I get so excited when I see such great work. Writing matters, friends. It does more every day.

Late-night conversation

You're doomed, in other words. Welcome!

Go to sleep. Go to hell. Go fuck yourself.

Doomed is good though. Doomed is a starting point. Doomed is where writers get good. Doomed is where Buk pulled from.