Dehydration

Another weekend full of writing. Remember how I said

it feels like I'm not digging down deeply enough into my own flesh to write it

? Yeah, I don't feel that way anymore. I bled. It was terrible. I wrote a HALP-type email to a friend, and she conjured up the image of Spongebob and Patrick under the drying lights at Shell City

and yes, that was exactly how I felt at the end of it. I drank some whiskey and played Spider and felt better, but I do not want to write this story again.

I'm going back to it either tomorrow or next weekend to add another short section and assemble it properly, and I think I'll be assembling with scissors and tape. The sections don't go together as I wrote them, and as of yet I don't know exactly how they will.

A talk with Matt yesterday forced me to confront the fact that I'm not sure this piece has an audience beyond the professor who challenged me to write it and maybe two other friends. I don't like the idea of putting my name on it in the public sphere, and Matt likes that idea even less (not because he's interested in censoring me, but because he loves me and doesn't want people picking on me).

I don't really know what to do about this, because I have never been much afraid of revealing personal stuff about myself in the past, but this thing - this subject - it's truly frightening for me. And what I wrote goes beyond me to people I love, which isn't fair to them. (I'm sorry to be vague, but that is the nature of the few subjects I'm afraid to talk about: I don't end up talking about them.) There may be a time for me to revisit this piece as something publishable, or it may be something I can send out anonymously, but in the state it's in, I can't imagine strangers knowing it was me who wrote it.

This is the first time I've ever been in this position. I try to be a warrior on the page. It feels weird to be so profoundly uncertain. I'm uncertain all the time about whether this is better than that or whether I'm doing writing the right way, but to be uncertain about whether it was a good idea to write this thing at all? That's new.

I have half a dozen other things to write - a piece about aging, revisions on the secret project, an academic paper that is little more than an attempt to go to Hawaii, at least one application for a fellowship, an idea that's not fully developed yet but that could be interesting if it doesn't turn out to make me look absurdly arrogant. I wrote a poem the other day, too. I think the transition into summer, and shifting all my brewing energy toward things other than school, may have begun.

In other news, I'm reading this book called I Hate the Internet, because the author is coming to my class tomorrow to talk about a different book and I wanted to read this one before I met him. It's misanthropic and hilarious and cleverly structured and I'm enjoying it. But I don't think it's a book for everybody. I haven't figured out whether its negativity is working for me or actually not working for me, whether or not it's other stuff in the book that is making me like it rather than its overwhelming cynicism.

In other other news, I filled out an application for graduation (with my M.A.) in spring of 2017. A plethora of things could happen between now and then that would push my graduation back to fall '17 or spring '18, but I think I can make it. It's kind of scary, because I don't know what will happen after that. But I also can't wait to see what happens after that.