twenty-one tuesdays
aspiring river seeks bank
this is the gist: there are twenty-one tuesdays until I turn thirty. the plan—no!—the game, the curiosity, the weekly fun prank I’ll play on myself—is to post something on every one of these tuesdays, both publicly and behind the paywall, so, most likely, one short video publicly, and one piece of writing here. these items can be in conversation with each other or go in completely different directions, depending on the week, and they can consist of anything, be any length, but preferably with some heft, and not exclusively metaposting, but some is okay.
before freedom became the most important thing, I did manage to write five books, two of them under contract, but the engine behind almost all of this writing was inadequacy, a feeling of barely having a nose above water, and so I needed to be exceptional again and again or else I would actually die. this was not sustainable. when the opening came to be free, to rid myself of the contracts entirely, to break up with the agents—oh. relief. and then the spark-chasing began. flitting around. la di da. this has been fun in moments, the bounding around between various mediums. here’s a video once a year, here’s a short story, an essay, a poem—and I am building, I guess, in a way, a body of work—but in my body there is no momentum feeling, no feeling of being thrust towards. I sit fixed in a vacuum and attend to a sudden spark, which feels good—and then the spark is satisfied and glints into nothing and I’m back in the dark, which feels bad. I recently started bouldering (trendy) and a type of climb I like to do is one where the only way to get to a hold above you is to rock yourself first in the opposite direction, once, twice, three times, to generate enough momentum to launch yourself upward (and then, if you’re like me, miss the hold anyway and fall loudly at the feet of a gaggle of teenage boys, who are queued up behind you for the hard one). I want that feeling but for the work. whoosh.
