august 27, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

The first thing I said this morning was “fuck you” to my alarm clock. It’s the kind of day when inanimate objects aren’t even safe from the scope of condemnation. But it might also be the kind of day when moods burn off like fog—I only need to find the sun. 

 

There’s nothing wrong, really, aside from perhaps an excess beer last night and some shitty sleep. There was a time such things were routine for me, and yet it was a mystery at the time why everything seemed so bleak. I had no access to natural light or a window at work back then either, and I was in grad school. 

 

Grad school. I finished all that about a year ago now. I haven’t written fiction in any significant way since, and I’m about twenty pounds heavier. Some of it’s good weight, but not all of it—another year’s worth of beers and tasty garbage, another year’s worth of reading, another year’s worth of gigs. More and more the whole grad school thing feels like something I did for lack of anything better to do, desperate after covid to get back out in the world and do something, desperate in general to be anything. I love to write, and I love a lot of the people I met there, but I’m not sure my version of twenty-two years old had much to write about other than hating his job. Now I don’t hate my job and I don’t know what to write about. Go figure. Maybe I’ll figure it out at twenty-six. 

 

Compulsory page requirements led to a lot of forced writing, and I think that made me a better songwriter, though, so I got a direct 1:1 thing out of grad school, at least. My student loan debt balance makes it easy to regret the whole thing but I try not to sink into that. It’s all just numbers on a spreadsheet somewhere and the “World” seems to be edging closer to some sort of calamity every day anyway. 

 

Yet, there’s that apocryphal internet hoax about some Assyrian tablet from 2800 B.C. bitching about kids today, and how the world is ending. Veracity of it aside, maybe the whole “the world is ending” line of thinking is nothing new and has less to do with material reality than it does with my desire to abdicate responsibility for big shit in my life that scares me. 

 

Yet again, climate change. 

 

What keeps me from writing is, when I start writing a story or something, after somewhere around the seventh word, my brain remembers all the big bad shit happening in the world and it makes the practice of pen and pad feel anachronistic at best, joyless always, and ludicrous at worst. I preemptively anticipate the idea of “I know a people is being erased in real time in a highly visible way, and our government is aiding and abetting that, but here’s a little story I came up with to distract you from that.” Our very own grassroots bread and circus. And then I stop writing.

 

Yet again, something big and scary to abdicate responsibility for my inability to write fiction for over a year, on the flipside. 

 

Maybe it’s something to do with genre. If fiction is a filter on reality, it feels like a time when we should at least be looking at things clear-eyed and unabated. That’s not to criticize or denigrate any of my peers who still write and publish fiction—it’s only to try to understand why I can’t seem to do it anymore. When I was in grad school, I had an excuse. There were academic and social expectations that I would produce 150 new pages of fiction every six months, so regardless of how much I felt like my own material was bullshit, I needed to produce it. There were financial and prideful stakes on getting the work done. Now, however…

 

Maybe I just feel like I’m inadequate as a writer to rise to the responsibility I feel fiction writers have in a time like this. Or any time, really. As soon as the world was made it started falling apart, I guess. 

 

I started writing these entries in May. Already it has been long enough that I can look back and see clearly that the title is a strategic ploy to give myself psychological permission to write. It’s self-effacing (performative), minimizing so as to reduce expectations (journaling) and acknowledges the whole “my material is bullshit” paradox I just wrote about (at the End of the world). Also therein lies an implied meaning that none of this is meant to be for anyone else, and so I have permission from myself to write whatever I want. Simultaneously, a couple of you have read these and responded to them positively. If you’ve responded to them negatively, you’ve had enough mercy not to let me know. Please, continue that practice, for I am fragile and don’t want criticism.

 

(That’s not entirely true. While I am sensitive to criticism, I am also a raging egotist desperate at all times to know what people are thinking about me and my work. So if you hate me to my core and think everything I write fucking sucks, feel free to DM me on Instagram about it.) 

 

There are none of those psychic caveats present in fiction, or at least, if there are, I haven’t found the strategy to employ them for myself. Any time I would typically reserve for writing fiction usually gets swallowed up by reading instead. For now, that means Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973 National Book Award Winner, and my second exposure to Thomas Pynchon. I’m on page 20. It’s really funny, batshit insane, and it’s one of those books that gives you permission to write about whatever you want, because clearly Pynchon didn’t give a shit if people found a seven-page scene about bananas to be stupid. He just did it anyway. 

 

I think I just found my strategy: the hard-nosed, austere commitment to just doing it anyway, even if the world sucks and it feels like there’s very little we can do about it in a direct sense.

Simultaneously, if I’m not having fun with it, why am I going through such psychic hoops trying to convince myself to write fiction in the first place? 

 

Is it because I feel like I have to? That’s what I used to tell myself. I also think fun is overrated. It might sound antiquated, but my half-baked thought is that sometimes fun stands on the other end of a dual with duty, and it’s up to you who is quicker on the draw. It’s so much easier to lapse into “fun,” and unfortunately for me, a lot of the time that looks like passive consumption, of media, of beer, of bad food, of lowbrow nonsense, which is very convenient for the worst people on earth. On the flipside, this kind of thinking is also super easy to mock—duty? to write fiction? What year is it? How important do you think you really are? 

 

Sometimes, the way we talked about writing in grad school made me wonder what any of us were doing there. There’s a famous Hemingway quote about writing and how it’s easy, you just need to sit at a typewriter and bleed. There were seminars and lectures about elaborate schemes to coax more writing out of yourself. Basically, a lot of the time, it came across like some people just weren’t having any fun. My favorite writers in the program seemed to be in it for the love of the game, though. Maybe I’m just projecting. Anyway, ultimately, you’re just a kid playing in a sandbox, or another daydreaming about what his stuffed animals do while he goes to school. There’s a childish (in the positive sense of the word) impulse at the heart of making things. It’s play. Or at least, it’s supposed to be. 

 

Is it? What the fuck do I know? 

 

By the powers vested in the president of my grad school at the time and the Great State of Vermont, I hold a professional degree in creative writing, specifically fiction. Theoretically this means if I got published enough and impressed the right people and kissed the correct asses I could ostensibly teach other people how to write things, or lecture at undergrads about Beowulf or some shit. Which, to me, just reveals that the whole time I grew up, maybe none of the people I looked up to really knew what they were doing, and I find that beautiful, liberating, and terrifying at the same time. 

 

Important subtext: my grad school no longer exists in Vermont, really—it merged with some SoCal school. That’s neither here nor there, but the point is that grad school creative writing programs are seemingly disappearing every day, and I wonder how much of that has to do with pure economics and how much of it has to do with the fact that we’re using a fundamentally dated and irrelevant form. Maybe irrelevant is harsh. But, put another way, we occupy the same space in culture as vinyl collectors. The dominant forms for delivering cultural artifacts are visual and have been for decades—first it was movies and TV, but now it’s even dumber, in the form of TikToks and YouTube shorts and Instagram reels and other branded bite-size bullshit delivery devices called different things even though they’re all really the same, another instance of the illusion of choice under capitalism. Most people stream their music, and we listen to vinyl, and that’s fine. I think there will always be people who love to read and others who hunger to create things on paper, but maybe grad-level creative writing programs function under the assumption that literature (used here broadly to encompass all written words and not to denote genre) holds way more cultural capital as a significant art form than it currently does. 

 

I do love to read, and as a result I end up spending a lot of time doing so in bars. Inevitably, despite the book I’m holding intending to be a massive neon sign that says “fuck off, I don’t want you to talk to me,” people will usually come up to me and say something akin to “how are you reading IN A BAR?” Depending on my mood and state of inebriation, my response varies from “oh you know, I like the buzz in the background” to a stern “well, I’m not reading anymore.” And I wasn’t there, and I don’t intend to mythologize and valorize the past, but I imagine it was nowhere near as rare a sight to see someone reading in a bar in 1970 than it is in 2024. Novels and short stories occupied more cultural weight as a means of entertainment then than they do now and that’s just obvious. The famous workshops that produced the Cheevers of the world functioned with the implication that there was economic potential in the work being completed. In other words, you could sell books and maybe get a tenured position and survive off of that labor. Now, all the writers I know that publish work I enjoy reading are scraping and clawing away in adjunct positions, or working multiple jobs, unless they’re massively lucky. And I wonder how tenable the whole “spend fifty-thousand dollars to learn to write” thing will be in a few years as more and more people wise up to this dynamic. 

 

This has become a bit long and rambley, and I’m anticipating a bit of disagreement and blowback for this, but I really don’t think anything I’m saying is all that controversial. If it’s obviously false and full of shit, please see my earlier comment re: egotism and my desperate desire to know what you think. 

 

To close this circle, I’ll say the fog has lifted, both literally and over my mood. That felt kinda good. Maybe that is the point after all.