Beach Read?

Checking in and writing about writing

I don’t have an advice post to right at the moment so I thought I’d check in and tell you what I’m up to and thinking.

(You can write in questions HERE!)

This morning I woke up early for a Saturday (8:30am) and went around to my neighborhood’s annual garage sale. I spent $5 on a cup of lemonade because I was the first sale of the day, and the girl’s didn’t have change yet. They all cheered which made the $5 cup worth it. And, it’s a rule that you must buy lemonade from lemonade stands when you see them! It’s an ode to the neighbors who paid me $5 for a sugary cup years ago.

I ran into my friends Max and Andrea and Max and I stared at a pile of appliance boxes that looked brand new. The sale runner told us that his late wife had got all of those appliances at the casino. She loved the casino. “At the casino?” Max asked. I tried to picture the casino giving out boxed appliances instead of money and I couldn’t. We took his word for it.

I love neighborhood events. I love saying “good morning” to my neighbors when I pass them. One fellow was having an estate sale in a first-floor apartment and it took place in just one room. He said that his mother had passed a year ago and he was just trying to sell all the stuff she had bought. “She just bought and bought and bought.” It didn’t look like an excessive amount of stuff to me and the pieces there were kind of special and somewhat used. A Pillsbury dough boy cookie jar, a couple of haunted-looking porcelain dolls. I bought a little enamel mug because I too, like to buy and buy.

I got a couple of cool items and then came home to make an egg scramble and walk Basil. Spencer’s been on tour for a month now and I’ve sort of gotten into a routine of being alone in the house. I don’t mind being alone at all, but I hate emptying the dishwasher and taking out heavy trash bags. I miss Spencer. I had a dream last night that he was wearing an oversized worn brown leather jacket that I kept burying my face into. We went to a diner and the food they served us was all wrong but we were so happy. It felt close to reality.

Since lunch, I’ve been laying on our porch with a fan on. I gardened all day yesterday so, I’m surrounded by my plants and flowers. I’ve been reading. I picked up The Sentence by Louise Erdrich to finish but I can’t remember where I last left off and got confused so I then picked up Night Moves by Jessica Hopper. My friend Kerry gave it to me as a birthday gift and I’ve been meaning to read it. Both The Sentence and Night Moves are written in a sparse narrative style that reads more like a journal than anything.

While reading, I do as I often do, and started thinking about writing more than the reading and then I stared up at the sky and started thinking about writing more than doing the actual writing.

These two books made me think of Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson and made me want to read it again. A short story collection that changed my view on what it is to write a novel when I was in college. It’s the book that made me start thinking about writing non sequitur, but I fear that’s what’s got me into today’s sticky trap. I don’t know how to start anything. I’m horrified by the idea of sitting down at my laptop and starting a novel. I think that I’ll write a bunch of stuff and just throw it together but I’m not really doing that either. How to get past brain blocks? I’m open to advice.

What Denis Johnson said about Jesus’ Son was, “I never even wrote that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories and people would say, You should write these things down.”

So, writing things down. I also recently bought Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It’s a book about the writing process. I keep asking myself, “how much can I keep reading about writing before it becomes self-destructive because it’s keeping me from actually writing?” Again, no answer. Open to advice.

Anyway, I have this idea for a beach read and every day I think it’s a better idea to just write a fun book. To stop trying to please my professors of yore and write the next best American Novel. Stop trying to be so “literary.”

I don’t know what being literary means anymore and the more I read, the more I think it’s made up.

I wake up every day dreaming of Lake Michigan. I dream of sunset walks and 9pm ice cream and waking up to a loved one downstairs, brewing coffee. Little girls selling lemonade. I dream of taking a shower and a nap after a long day at the beach. Shit that feels magical to me. Shit that feels literary!

So, writing things down. Beach read. And so on.

I hope your May is going well. I love this time of year so much. The whole summer is laid out before us, untouched but so close.

My cousins, Gordie and Clay, in Michigan 2010