I hate it when I go a whole month without writing on here.
You were on my mind, dear diaryland. I promise. I just didn't have all that much to say. Or I did, just not the energy, I suppose.
Yesterday wrapped up 13 days of work in a row. I calculated it at somewhere close to 140 hours of work. I am excited about the resulting paycheck, but it's not that much really. I love my jobs, but they do not pay well.
I have had plenty of time for reflection and thought over the last two weeks, as most of that time was spent at the guard shack in an empty factory.
But it always feels like the same thoughts and reflection.
I know there is nothing to do but to do. I know I just want to think and plan forever, but if I want a different life, a life that more closely resembles the one I want, I need to take action.
Last night at the bookstore, I was reading through a graphic novel about the life of Anais Nin, and at some point, her husband Hugo tells her that she can't dream her way into a better world.
And I actually don't know that much about Nin, but I was under the impression that she was not famous while alive. At any rate, it seems she is most famous for her extensive diary writing which, again I don't know but believe, was published after her death.
I do know this was more or less the case with Emily Dickinson. Poems upon poems locked away in her desk drawers. They found closets full of Bukowski's poems after he died. Wasn't that true of Kafka as well?
Is the measure of success for a writer to be known and read by people who will earnestly discuss the thoughts expressed and feel moved by whatever sentences said writer types out? It would seem so. I am sure the world is full of mad geniuses who scribbled furiously all of their secret revelations about the world but who are now long dead and forgotten, their life's work discarded along with whatever was left in their refrigerator when they passed away.
The most harrowing thing about working at a bookstore for me is the clearance shelf. Which at our store isn't even looked at very often by customers. Last night, I sat there and tenderly picked up books, flipped through the pages, and looked at the author photos. Each book represented a year at least of that person's life. Their heart and soul went into it. Books were printed in anticipation, only to go for years now unsold. Discount stickers on the spine.
I wonder sometimes what will become of me. How long my memory will persist after my demise.
Will I ever even make it to the clearance shelf? Will I produce a big enough body of work that it will be noticed when whoever it is comes to sort through my belongings after my body is carted away?
Does that matter?
Isn't a good life one full of love and splendor? Legacy and memorial and immortal words are only saved for a few.
Is that why I write? Do I dare aspire to be one of the rare ones that makes it?
Or is writing and art and walks through the woods and music and making out all one and the same quest for said love and splendor? It feels like it is joy enough as it is.
And maybe that's the thing I need to remember to get myself writing again. It is not for fame or approval or the adoration of strangers.
But like Anais Nin and Emily Dickinson and all of those forever unknown mad geniuses, I write for myself.
I write because there are things I don't know how to say.
I write because it is the only proof of this vast and vibrant internal world of my mind.
It is lightly raining. A murder of crows are in the tree outside my window. Lucy the calico wizard cat is snoring softly.
There is very little that is right with the world, but this here right now feels good.
Time for some hot chocolate.
7:43 a.m. - 2023-12-01
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