If you haven’t been feeling great mentally you might start doing daily writing exercises to stimulate creativity. But try to find ones that are okay if you do not do them in case you are tired, or aimless, or just plain old forget. Tell a boring story and see where it takes you.
I forgot I had volleyball practice once. Well not forgot. I thought it was at 5 pm and I had spent the afternoon lavishing in what felt like an extra hour stretched into my day. When I meandered to practice around 4:30. As I approached I was surprised to hear no teammates in the lock room, no chatter or music, no bustling sounds of getting ready. When I entered the clarity of what was off escaped me, but something was wrong. Iwas not that early. I was pulling my white socks taut on my toees when I remembered suddenly that Tuesday practices started at 4 pm and sure enough Tuesday it was. I still don’t know how I had messed it up so late in the season. We had had this schedule for months. I ran into the gym crying, more mortified than upset. The next day (retracted) wrote about it in his blog post.
His blog post was a whole thing. He published one every week.
What did he write about? I don’t know. Nothing. A lot of things. Nothing in between. Generally, it was him preaching favor to some small habit of life, casting humble suggestions to entertain a particular structure, a way to organize, some moral orientation worthy of displinced pursuit birthed in the reflective allegories that constituted his daily life, often inspired by his work with young athletes. This day it would be about how he would rather see a player cry for accidentally missing half of practice than see a player there and indifferent the entire time. It was essentially propaganda.
- (Retracted) was the media.
(Retraced) was somewhat powerful in the humble athletics department of a humble institution. He was respectable in this, and only this, regard. He was the weight trainer that could give you a job ; ) It somewhat obscured his creepiness. When he hired me to work the front desk at the school gym I was grateful. When he chose me to demonstrate the heimlich maneuver on to the group of new hires during our.first aid training, I can’t say I felt special as much as I felt guilty for feeling it. He bent me over with a notable force that a friend later commented on, and gave me five abdominal thrusts. It was awful. I became repulsed of this man’s soul. It didn’t matter. He wrote a blog post every week and every week I read it. I would talk to him about, offer him my analysis as I worked for him, sitting at the blue desk that he would come lean over.
Typing every week writing exercises into the duckduckgo search bar. Never pursuing them. Sometimes writing my dreams. Sometimes practicing taking ethnographic field notes on the bus. Sometimes daily journaling. Sometimes starting open-ended lists.
beautiful things in feburary
- A friend sending you a poem
- Roller-skating again.
- Being inside. Crustaceans and shells and memories
- ________________________ !
- Taking your first honest ever mental health day and
- Not shaming yourself for it.
- For not rolling your eyes reading this again.
- Forgiving yourself for rolling your eyes.
Maybe will be my daily writing exercise, (Retracted). Maybe it will be like a prayer. Maybe it won’t be daily. Maybe you’ll think that it is dumb or unrigorous:
We hardly know how men come across the courage to put their shitty thoughts out into the world but this is an exercise to build it. Find two things that you have written down in your notes app and write any surfacing reflections on them. Possible Prompts: Who was your percieved audience then and now? What were you thinking when you wrote it? What were you doing? In what ways does it still resonate? What has changed? What lingers? What is gone?
Here is something I wrote in my “lines for poems” note in Noteapp on November 13th
i make love to what never happened and i make it cum.
You get it right? It’s clearly as sardonic as it is serious, right? Dear god I hope it made you laugh. It is so terrifying when you don’t know if people are gonna get it. You know? It makes you kind of not want to not speak. Why do I have to speak anyways? What if the daily writing exercise was not writing? Not explaining? What if never going back to witness writing is as great if not great a sin than not writing is itself? I feel like my therapist would say that here it seems I slipping to a philosophical reflection as to avoid some emotions, some memory. I would lean back smug and say probably with a big gremlin twinkle rolling around my eye and they would have to laugh, proving humor my mechanism of avoidance that they cannot disable as I am their funniest client. I probably should tell them about (retracted), right? Eh. I can imagine myself telling them there is something I want to talk about but I don’t want to start a conversation about it. I can imagine them suggesting we explore that resistance. I could imagine that. But I think for here, we can just move on.
Here is something 1 that I wrote September 14th
you desire unattainability because you think unattainability is a thing, and not a very fact of being
Yeah got ’em. I wrote this on a walk. I was projecting and sensing and angry and sad. I just want to say, I hate men. And I hate myself and I love men and I love myself. I mostly hate people who don’t bother trying to see other people while keeping them around for the sake of self-adumbration, a little something to hold their form around. I know I do it too, I know I am a hypocrite. But at least I know to have some shame for it. At least I feel around for it, organizaing my attention. At least I feel the burn of building self-tolerance in reverant consideration for what I could have not known before but have now come to learn At least I let concern extend itself into the things that I do, into care for the beings I participate in interaction with. At least I try and if I can’t I let them go.
It seems we have gone in many directions. How about some narrative to streamline? I bet you want a pungent little allegory to pair with assault? Well, there is no pepper. We don’t coordinate like that. There is a volleyball joke here. People say a joke isn’t funny you if you have to explain it, so I am not going to try. But I will let you know that it is your fault if you don’t get it.
- As I type this my cat has rested her paw on my hand and she is purring and it is so sweet. My hands are moving in a way that must be annoying to her, but she hasn’t yet threatened with any claw pressing into flesh. Okay. Now she is attacking me ↩︎
what to do when your cat is experiencing an existential crisis 
Leave a comment