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Jan 23, 2024
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There is something ugly and small about winter that I like. Perhaps because I was born into it. And there’s a stillness too. I feel it most when I’m back home in Nebraska leaving the bar at 2 a.m., warmed by old friends and tiny drinks. I walk to the car, snow crunching underfoot and, as soon as I’m alone, I stop. I stop and listen. I love that moment of quiet, blue desolation.
I do not handle the cold well. I am quick to shiver and my long johns don’t come off once they go on. So these moments of serenity are strange and precious. Something deep inside me quietly overpowers the elements and I feel some kind of inner peace. For this reason, I once made an igloo in our backyard and then laid inside for hours trying to fall asleep inside that feeling.
Winter birthdays are a challenge. What is there to do? This year I decided to lean in and seek snow since that’s become something of a novelty in New York. $500 and 120 miles later I had my squall. When I returned to the city for my actual birthday, it finally snowed, marking New York's first significant snowfall in 701 days. It was the perfect gift.
Jan 24, 2024
Every Monday, me and a bunch of other Brooklyn degenerates congregate at The Gutter in Williamsburg to destroy some pins and drain some longnecks. I've been bowling at the Gutter for eight years now and most seasons we lost miserably, but now we're sort of good. Joining the league was a great way to meet people and I always look forward to league night, especially during tough or lonely periods. Plus, just about everyone is charmed when you tell them you're in a league.
I look like I work for IBM in the 90s in this pic but here I am with my high score (181).
Jan 22, 2024
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I felt like I was on trial watching Anatomy of a Fall -- for my failures as a writer and the ensuing resentments misdirected at my partner. Seeing my private torments litigated in a riveting courtroom drama, spoken in clinical French, was titillating. The writing was so sharp I could’ve just listened like the blind son Daniel and been engaged. But I loved watching Daniel practice piano, the baby blue glaze over his eyes and his surprise testimony in a redrum turtleneck.
The story wastes no time. Within five minutes, the husband is found dead, bleeding out in the snow. An autopsy cannot rule out foul play and his wife, a writer, becomes the sole suspect. What unravels in court is not only the events that precipitated the death of her husband, but an ultimate tea concoction of their strained relationship, competing literary ambitions and the blame and guilt surrounding the accident that blinded their son.
Entering a foreign court is a bit jarring. The rules, procedures and dress are notably different from America and seem silly when defamiliarized. The prosecutor, a bald little gremlin robed in red, was probably my favorite character. Arched, dry and eloquent, he bludgeoned the accused writer with an avalanche of incriminating evidence and was quick to undercut any counter/argument from the defense. Court rules in France appear to allow more cross-talk, making the arguments more conversational than U.S. court dramas, which glorify long-winded monologues.
Impressively, the writer/director thread the needle so well that one is never quite convinced one way or the other. I am easily persuaded and in this lawyerly tug of war, I felt myself suspended over a chasm with demons of jealousy, envy and pride snapping at my feet.
For all the talk of literary failure, this was a written masterpiece. I am drawn to such stories, like a moth to flame, for so many deep and cutting reasons. Like the husband, I deflect and blame others for my shortcomings: If only X, Y and Z were different, then I could write! The wife’s gaslighting voice lives within me too: Make the time and do it, coward! And I disdain my father for giving up sports journalism, and for withholding those ambitions from me (Had I known earlier, maybe then I’d be a staff writer!) and on himself in general.
Funny enough, when I was biking home after seeing Fallen Leaves last week, I had the high thought that my senior thesis anticipated my current condition with regards to writing. My argument was garbled -- something about the author subverting masculine forms/expectations of writing (adventure, heroism) using feminine forms (diary, domesticity) through an act of ventriloquy -- but the book I chose to write about was a book about a wannabe writer’s failure.
Called El Libro Vacio and written by Josefina Vicens, it was a novel about the shortcomings of a middle class man working in middle management and his literary shortcomings. He wanted to be a great writer, but he was tormented and uninspired by the banality of his day-to-day life as a family man. If only he didn’t have a kid and wife, he could hit the road and sail the high seas and finally have something to say! He studiously documents his failures and torments in a diary that amounts to the novel by Vicens.
In my early 20s, I was interested in what makes a good leader. I studied the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, the most winningest basketball coach Gregg Popovich and read more than a dozen presidential biographies. But now I find myself fixated on failure, my own and my fathers, and I want to learn the art of letting go.
Jan 22, 2024