there's so much i want to tell you
there's so much i want to tell you
here i go
All the little things, the burbles and giggles of the baby who appears by all accounts to be mine. The Chris Farley laugh whenever you tickle the right spot on her neck and how quickly - three to four tickles, tops – she’ll go from loving it to hating it and growling for you to stop.
About the growling, generally, like there’s a thousand year-old demon stuck inside of her screaming to get out.
About how she’s starting to nuzzle into me and how good it feels, like she’s hugging me back, like there’s someone there inside of all that cheek, growling hello.
But this just isn't one of those pieces. Maybe that’s what I want to tell you? How this is not one of those pieces about how much I love my little baby daughter.
About how I worry so much over what a piece is before it has had the time to become anything at all, like a musician named Gunther afraid to write beyond the first scribbles of a song for fear it might be yet another one of those damn ‘love songs.’
Don’t you see, Gunther? Everything is a love song.
Even the hate songs are love songs.
Even the songs about how everything is a love song and/or a hate song are themselves love songs, just the way that everything that isn’t actually is, and everything that is, well, also is. And isn’t. Which, itself, is.
But is on first? It isn’t, is it?
No, but is is in first, literally - take away the fart (f, r, and t) and you’ve got is.
Gunther? Are you there? It was just a little fart joke come back Gunth, come back.
I want to tell you about how I’m losing the plot. About how one time I heard that the plot of the story is the least interesting part. A canoe to hold the reader as she rides atop the emotions of the piece.
Though maybe it’s the other way around? Maybe the emotions are a way to help us transfer the happenings of the story?
I want to tell you about a passage I read this morning by Lorrie Moore and I want to tell you that I would kill a small rodent to write anything half as good.
“But Bill, hadn't you heard? I mean, it's all over campus."
Actually, he had heard some rumors; he had even said, "Hope so" and once "May God bless their joyous union." But he hadn't meant or believed any of it. Such rumors seemed ham-handed, literal, unlikely. And yet wasn't reality always cheesy and unreliable just like that; wasn't fate literal in exactly that way? He thinks of the severed, crossed fingers found perfectly survived in the wreckage of a local plane crash last year. Such fate was contrary and dense, like a dumb secretary, failing to understand the overall gestalt and desire of the wish. He prefers a deeper, cleverer, even tardy fate, like that of a girl he knew once in law school who, years before, had been raped, shot, and left for dead but then had crawled ten hours out of the woods to the highway with a .22 bullet in her head and flagged a car. That's when you knew that life was making something up to you, that the narrative was apologizing. That's when you knew God had glanced up from his knitting, perhaps even risen from his freaking wicker rocker, and staggered at last to the porch railing to look.”
— “Beautiful Grade” by Lorrie Moore
About how there’s maybe no one living or dead whose writing makes my brain feel electric as a pinball machine than Lorrie Moore.
About how the showrunner Joey Solloway said that the first season of their show,l Transparent, centered around a single question: “would you still love me if…” which is sort of the question for all of us, all of the time.
And/or that question’s adolescent cousin, “will you love me if?”
About how we ping-pong back and forth between the two questions - (1) will you love me if I do this? and (2) but will you still love me if I do that? in hopes of triangulating our way to the third question, or rather the first: did you love me before I did any of it? Will you always?
I want to talk to you about the numbers, again, even though I feel as though it is all I talk about. How I thought this morning about whether there was any possible reality where I could write and share my work without needing quantified feedback in return. How I know you can turn off the likes and comments on Substack, but can you though? Can I? I'd still crave it, that feedback, wouldn't I? And I'd find another way to quantify it. Like how many people wrote me email responses. One? Good. Three? Stellar. Zero? Awful, again, always.
About how I feel like there’s really nothing else besides the numbers anymore? Book publishing and movies and even last night — we went to a storyslam at The Moth in Asheville. Ten people told stories and after each one, the judges gave them scores. 9.2. 8.1. 9.8! I daydreamt of doing one and how I could ‘’crush it” until one gigantic dude brought the house down with a genuinely very funny story about how his parents used to give him and his siblings ‘whoopings’ most every night and how they deserved 99% of them.
About how I ponder, too often, why my parents didn’t beat me, like what am I supposed to tell stories about now?
I want to tell you so much, but I can’t, but I’m trying. I’m trying and that feels good. It isn’t happiness but what is? A loaded gun? That thing with feathers? No, that’s hope.
I want to have hope. Does anyone?
I think I did have it, for a few minutes the other day, when I found myself realizing how absurd it was to be so angry at everyone and everything and especially people who were ‘’coaches” and “healers” and slick mantra-dealers. Who does it help, my anger at them and how “fake” they are? I don't know Jack diddly Doo about what's fake or real and neither do they and we're all just trying to get along any which way.
About whether we’re all little trains who simply need to believe we have the ability to hope? I think I hope…I think I hope…I think I hope…I think I hope…I think I hope…etc.
About how that was how I felt then.
About how it’s hard to access that feeling now beyond the intellectual. Now, the soft spot on my neck that can make me tickle is closed up and I am growling again by default, though perhaps the tenor and pitch and gutter (how gutteral something is) has softened too, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
I need to tell you how I’m fairly sure a random comment I read online describing my writing as “too much with the ‘dad’ thing” has haunted me, first in awareness and now in absentia, for the last year. About how it stop me from writing and even believing an idea is worthy to write about, all out of fear that I’ve become “that writer,” the one I’ve built out of putty in my mind like a gargoyle who now sits in my mind and prevents me from being myself.
About how dumb that is and how I want to break free of it and how maybe I am, here, now, maybe.
I want to tell you that I want to stop worrying so much about how you will feel when you read my work. It’s all I think about and it’s driving me peanuts.
I want to tell you so much more. About this and that and the other, too.
But I won’t.
Because what kind of story would that be?
Pay for BAT and save a life
I mean my life. And I mean emotionally. But still! It’s a big deal. If you love the work and want to feel better than you did after doing Molly that one time, become a supporting BAThead.
Heck, it’ll let you read Tuesday’s piece which is Behind The Paywall:
comments? questions? concerns???
Lotta stuff in this one so let’s just talk about it?
Also in case ur curious there isn’t any big secret that I’m vaguestacking about here. At least not one I know of????
Anyways, I’ll be here let’s chitchat like riffraff.
V beautiful, v lovely, v FLOWY (which my fave English teacher said isn’t a way to describe writing but there I said it!!!!)
To those who think (or, dare I say, say): oh he’s become *that writer “... Well, have we become “that reader”? Even tho I’m a childless cat lady who doesn’t actively clamber for parental columns, any fodder is good fodder especially if written by a talented fodder such as yourself (<—that was a solid Dobrenko, no?) I don’t need to OMGSAME everything I read, nor should I. Nor should you? Our canoes don’t have to match. The river’s the thing.