Things That Make My Throat Hurt

Sad, sad movies in which the girl gets the diagnosis, the dog saves his boy, or the dead romantic sinks to the ocean floor, and he’s as blue and cold as anyone’s ever been

Morning bus rides from home to not home

Any mall for more than fifteen minutes, with its exhausting fluorescence, overpriced imports, and security personnel profiling the young and un-white

The radiator’s screaming, dry heat as it settles like baby powder in my airways

The memorable dream about the old man and all that he needs from me and that he’ll die when I wake up, unless, perish the thought, he recurs

Orange-flavored candies, the kind that aren’t fooling anybody’s taste buds

Watching someone I love cough in bed, their eyes red and searching for sleep

Impersonations of Bale’s Batman that I wouldn’t dare perform for anyone living outside of Bathroom Mirror, USA

The impossibility of keeping my un-tuned mouth shut during my favorite bands’ shows

The phrase, “the end of an era”, even when I say it

Sugary touchdown shots at a dive bar during football season

The clock in every corner of every room that ticks my mother’s minutes, my father’s working memory, and my brother’s last chances away

Wrong-tube sandwich bites

All the bad -isms that I’ve heard co-workers and television deny the existence of

The days after the nights spent sleeping head first in the traditionally ass-first toilet bowl

The part when Peter has to fly back home alone, the only boy still lost

The happiest days of my life, both as they happen and as they are kept, catalogued neatly in my mind 

Staying up late to write out a list of things that make my throat hurt

Bad Writer

Slowly and especially on Chambers Street, winter is moving earth. It’s surprising how much expansion and contraction can happen within one season. I drive a Buick over what feels like a medium-scale model showing the first stages of the tectonic plates shifting.  I swerve around the miniature faultlines.  My right blinker illuminates a little chunk of East breaking off into a little chunk of West. Maybe I say this every year, and maybe it’s just my growing in age or cynicism, but doesn’t it seem, Casey, that the winter is losing it’s light? Doesn’t it, Casey, seem like the Wisconsin wonderland has lost its snow globe iconicism? The wind chills deeper. The snowflakes fall; they no longer dance down.

Over tea, like a real god-damned writer, I think about this. Then I think about how late I am to thinking about this. How thousands of other semi-fresh adults have considered it before me and will consider it after me, likely with more talented brain-to-hand-to-pen circuits with which to express it. This is why I never get any writing done. These are the ellipses that leave many a Google Doc unfinished. After paging through their open ends, I search for natural ways to mute this anxiety. Passionflower, valerian root, exercise, and boyfriend dates to distract myself from the issue at hand: that I don’t know if I want anything enough to work through the hard parts of it. That although I feel a loyalty to the ever-evolving mutt named English Language, I so fully do not understand how to, or how to need to, materialize it.

I detest the self-inflicted pressures of creating seemingly more than I do the desire to do so, yet I still come back to the blank page.  Is this a calling or is this a habit? Does this feel good or does this feel like shit? Is the constant stream of words through my head meant to be filtered into spring water for the masses or simply to be admired in quiet solitude?

Annie Dillard wrote my favorite book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and she also wrote many other books and she also wrote a book called The Writing Life and she also wrote many other books. Somehow. In The Writing Life she says, “I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.” I hesitate to read what professional, deservedly respected writers think about writing. I know what they’ll say. They’ll say they write for days in windowless rooms, even when it hurts. They’ll say their work is necessity. With it, they are in an early American marriage, until death do part. They make their work matter more, as if it were alive, and feel arbitrary less, as if it were to mean something in the end. I admire that and hope to understand how it feels someday.

I am a bad writer. This is not to say that I am necessarily inadequate in the finding, splicing together, taking apart, forcing, and balancing of words themselves, the taxidermy of it, it is to say that I am a bad employee of Writing. I work hard enough when I have to or when a project presents itself either by assignment or flirting muse, but I do not work overtime, do not take my job home with me, do not stay in on weeknights to ensure productivity on a Wednesday. When I sit down to write, I am all in and I am passionate. Then, when the phone rings, I am zipping up my coat; I am going out for pizza and a vodka seltzer. I am going out to tell Molly she looks pretty. Out to give and receive that good feeling. Out wondering how writing a fiction will ever mean more than making her day. Wondering how to leave the social group for intellectual solitude.

So, I’ve got these two strikes: the fear that my skill will always submit to my self-consciousness and uncertainty and the reality that I am more motivated by surrounding myself with the life in my sweet-blooded people than I am with the life I can literally create. I haven’t struck the third. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I keep notebooks and write for my blog and send letters and arrange silly lyrics for my friends to sing. That’s why I am in this adulterous marriage with a spouse I do not trust and who does not trust me. A spouse who I don’t love as much as many others could love, but who I, selfishly, will never leave.