I.
I’ve been trying to let myself off the hook for the series of behaviors I’ve cultivated over the last few years—behaviors that have congealed into characteristics, characteristics which threaten to congeal further into a whole new person: someone I no longer recognize. I look at my phone too much and I eat chips at night, watching bad shows because it seems like a way to relax. There are other things too, of course—a neurotic preoccupation with resource, the feeling of not being able to move or change, the feeling that I’ll lose my spot (?) if I take a break. It’s hard not to have thoughts about this, or frame it as a kind of slippage—harder still to fully permit myself to do these things without thinking, without judging. To watch the shows, and eat the chips, massaging Jay’s head while he falls asleep.
But let’s say that I don’t want to let myself off the hook—let’s say that the slippage is going to kill me. Let’s say that if I continue to look at my phone, scroll e.g. used clothing sites for deals (none) or fall into the void of magazine images comprising Instagram, sometimes for a whole hour, that I will lose the thread so entirely that there won’t be anything left of me for me to admire. This is the position that feels the most real, the most true—the position that leaves me with no other choice but to identify what I want from my experience on earth, and then move toward it diligently: a little bit closer each day.
II.
From the westernmost edge of our dusty front porch couch, through a merciful gap in the neighbors’ trees, I can see the mountain. In the early morning, the distant piney ridgeline of Mount Jumbo cuts dark and jagged against the purple sky, the rolling grass of Waterworks Hill just visible in its foreground. This braid—sky, Jumbo, rolling hills—is what keeps me company in the pre-dawn dark. When I lose the thread, or get sick of myself, I look toward it. The light arrives incrementally, casting the mountain braid in paler shades of purple, then indigo, then dark green.
I’m out here wrestling. Lifting up rocks, going to therapy. All the phrases I attribute, laughingly, to the process of combing through everything I have that relates to The Book—an assignment I’ve given myself for these early mornings with the mountain. “Everything I have” equates to a junk drawer of feeling—road trips, love letters, sketches of people I love. I have folders of word documents labeled things like “River_newnew” or “River_Bex” or “River_v3.” I have forty-seven Substack drafts, dozens of voice memos I’ve recorded to myself. I have lists of varying outlines of the book in my Notes app, on the Notion website, in my emails to myself. Summarial sentences that I tossed off (stoned), then returned to underline, then annotated in loopy all-caps: THIS IS WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT. Big circles drawn around the summation, in case future-me skims over it too quickly, and misses it all.
A wiry young woman and her dog run past every morning, both loping determinedly, like they’re training for something long. Two separate older men walk their dogs briskly in different directions, most days craning their necks into our van as they pass it, sometimes pausing to look inside. The neighbor exits his house with his young son in tow around 7:20 every morning. They half-jog to the truck, load the dog in, then gun it down the road—diesel engine revving hard. When he returns twenty minutes later he’s alone, less stressed. The sky lighter. He lets the dog out, and the dog bounds swiftly to the fence line across the street, an old chain-link overlooking some decrepit apartments where the neighborhood cats go in and out. The dog gives the same husky three-part bark, chasing some invisible creatures through the holes. “Come-on,” the neighbor says, holding the gate open, and every morning the dog comes bounding back through it, back into his own world.
I sip my coffee and lift up the rocks. For years The Book has been on my mind, on my to-do list, something nagging at me from the subcutaneous layer—yelling at me from a depth. It’s been an idea to stick other ideas onto, a title to rotate the metaphors of my life around. It’s been a story and a treatise and an elegy. It’s been a pit, a spring, a bridge. For years I tried my best to merely glance at it, hold it in the periphery, because to give into it would mean an unraveling of life—would require an exhausting amount of scraping and examination. Would require writing.
When the sun does crest it’s sudden—shocking, really. Actually being awake to see it. There’s sitting alone in the moody dark: ruminating, meditating, conjuring hazy visions of what the day might be. Then there’s the ACTUAL DAY, which exists the second the sun bubbles its molten heat over the ridge-line, erasing—obliterating—all speculation of itself. Obliterating night, thought, rumination. Beaming its light on what actually, literally, is.
III.
The book haunts. And leers. There’s the tidy metaphor of its containment properties: regardless of the imperfect language within, the imperfect flows and hollows of a book, the way a river is imperfect—pooling and then trickling and then shallowing, then growing algae, then killing fish—still: perfect-bound. One whole unit. For the person who thinks so many thoughts, and thinks them constantly, the book presents a vision of completion: a place where the river starts and ends, or at least a name for the river, or at least a vague map of how it moves. For this person the book suggests that, once the thoughts are out on the page, maybe they’d be tagged and pulled: out of the mind forever, or easily filed into a drawer you might never need to open again.
It might also be that the book is a casing—a slick, taut coating into which you can stuff all manner of raw meat. If, e.g., the decade of your twenties was so lusty and directionless as to suggest they belonged to a person who had no idea how the world worked, a person who gravitated toward the open-ended category of experience more than anything, definitely more than planning or saving or professional development, then the thought of stuffing those years into one package and sealing it up, sealing it off—wouldn’t that be hard to resist?
If I’m feeling small or scared, I can imagine the book (writing the book) as one of those coin machines in a drug store. You gather your sticky, unsorted change from all the crevices that only you know about—the cup holders and couch cushions, the backs and bottoms of cabinets. You dump them all in the slot, and out comes a clean paper voucher (minus, of course, the machine’s fee). With this voucher you might envision purchasing a modicum of security, depending on how many coins you’ve lost, then gathered. This month’s heat bill, for instance. A down payment on a house.
In my mind, at times, it all seems possible: write the book, sell the book. Seal it all off. Buy a place to rest. Couldn’t I do it? People do it every day. The Book sits in the back of my mind—a hail-mary for the version of the world in which software programs are being developed daily to replace human-made versions of everything: films, paintings, novels, poems. How would we process ourselves in that kind of future? Envision the way we might save ourselves? Become a river with clear signage? A little unit of meat?
IV.
The thing about the art demon is that sometimes you want it to haunt you. You want it to take up residence in your brain. You sweep the floors and water the plants and trim the bowls, all the while praying for the demon to inhabit your body, to infect you with some idea that you can’t stop thinking about, a fixation so compelling that it becomes your major preoccupation, your reason for getting up in the dark and pounding away on your little word document, all by yourself on the front porch, allegedly to chase the demon back out again.
This tidal ebb and flow—praying for the art demon, then fulfilling its insane requests, then trying to push it out of your mind, making room for the next one—is a good enough way to live an entire life. For an artist it might be the only way, the best way. The hardest part is making room in the rest of your life for this specific tide. Creating the infrastructure in which you might let your whole self be subsumed and released, over and over again, for as long as you can stand.
V.
The sun crests dramatically, then fixes itself in the sky. We leash the dog and exit through the back gate, the fence swollen with recent rains. I have to wedge my foot underneath and lift a little to squeak it open. Careful not to spill my coffee.
We walk through the gravelly alley toward the drainage creek, past clumps of weeds and moldering dog shit, potholes filled by an anonymous neighbor—somebody who owns a piece. I tell Jay what I wrote or what I didn’t write, what I tried to write. Today, for instance, I didn’t write the book but I did write about it. At least I think I did.
Other mornings there are no benchmarks to report—no way to describe what happened. I returned to the itinerant world of my twenties, its colors and landmarks, its concrete nouns. In that world I felt just as precarious as I do now, just as quietly concerned with how it’s all trending. I wonder if the feeling of precarity is stitched into the aura I was born with. If it’s stitched into the country’s air.
The first creek is dried up now—a rocky ditch hollowed of river runoff, freshly dusted with a skiff of yellow leaves. We cross the bridge and head on to the next one, chasing a stream from which the dog can drink.
The world is full of people who want to tell you, show you, teach you how to satisfy your own demon. Who claim to be able to tell you when it’s ready, and whether or not it’s good. You should put that in your book, Jay says, and this makes me so happy. Because what else could I really write about. What else is there to really say.