Grey Days, Fear and Loathing, Disconnect, Writing

I've been out of sorts for a couple of days. Nothing major, just a little off kilter, like I'm out of phase with everything else, like there's a little subliminal something sitting just in the corner of my eye, lending an unsettling bottom note to everything. I keep trying to get in touch with a friend, and we keep just missing each other by a thread, one of us running just too far ahead of the other to touch, and so I've felt disconnected from her. The weather is grey, which has made me feel disconnected from the sun. My sleep schedule was thrown off all weekend because I went to sleep at eight on Friday, a week of late nights and early mornings finally catching up to me. So all weekend, I woke up at four in the morning, my body telling me it had slept the requisite six hours and now it was time to get up, and I had to lull it back to bed and get my mind and my body to shut up and rest. Which has me feeling disconnected from my body.


Maybe it's me picking up Thompson, the radio wave of loathing and unease sent out by his spirit as it readied itself to leave: a signal of restlessness, of disorder, radiating out of the man for any and all of us with sensitive enough antennae to pick it up and let it interfere with our own electrostatic thoughts. Maybe it's my own spirit--my invisible room mate, the one who knocks on my door sometimes as I just slip into unconsciousness--waking me at night, trying to tell me something in that silent stagnant way of his. If only he wrote on the walls in blood, the way nice normal ghosts do, instead of just hanging around in my room

I woke up at six in the morning on Sunday with gastric discomfort, and found myself unable to do anything but fart and think about this post by Jeff Vandermeer, and more specifically this comment of his about style:

Some styles cannot multi-task. This is not a function of the simplicity or complexity of the prose, but a function of the simplicity or complexity of the layering the writer wishes to achieve; some writers have no choice but to operate at a simple level, while others can create simple and complex layering as they choose. Sometimes, the inability to multi-task is due to the banality of writer’s worldview. Sometimes, it is due to audience pandering. Sometimes, the writer hasn’t yet matured to the point where his or her style can carry the weight (or carry it in an effortless fashion).

I found myself thinking, "I don't layer my writing, do I? When I do, it's clunky...you can see my hands muddling about in the prose, you can hear me thinking I'm clever when I do something clever. Am I banal in my worldview? Is my prose just immature? Will it be more than immature...say...ever?" After a half hour of tossing, turning, incapable of sleeping or of shutting my brain up, I did the only thing I could think of. I got up and wrote for an hour. I thought about the structure of the Asexual Reproduction piece and the things my brother told me, which was essentially "Just fucking write, would you? Stop worrying about what you make and make it!" and in my relative state of tired restlessness, did just that inasmuchas I could.

Bonnie says she feels something new is in the works for me, but what new idea have I had? There's a lot of old ideas floating around in here, and ideas that haven't been realized, or new ideas that seem so large I can't even begin to know where to start. And what of the old ideas? That fucking novel who hangs out in my room the way the ghost does and that looks at me every time I turn on my computer with that accusatory file-glare it has that seems to remind me how I started to write it because my grandfather died and suddenly it seemed time to start something. Something other than wasting away and saying I would write the novel some day. And what will it take for me to get up and finish it? Another dead grandparent? What about the stories I started with such good beginnings that just won't end. Will they be left dangling? And what would it really matter if they did? In the grand scheme of things, I mean.

Ragnarok opens Friday. Anyone who is anywhere near Chicago when it does is invited. Anyone. And if you want to come on Wednesday and Thursday for previews, they're free and we need the audience.
Afterwards, maybe I'll be a cocoon for a while, melt away into goop and coalesce again from the essence of me into something new. Something connected. And until then, have beautiful dreams.