writing my way home

from jello to hello and back again

I was writing yesterday and feeling lost. Weighed down. Heavy.

the act of writing felt slow and sludgy like I was dancing my way out of a giant bowl of jello. It's a huge bowl so I'm in there, ensconced, like a beetle in a scarab.

was the work actually bad? I don't know. I haven't looked back through it. But it felt bad, and I kept writing and it kept feeling bad, like the air was soup and the cows would never come home.

but i trudged through and kept going, saying yes to the ‘no’ thoughts, following those lil demons wherever they led.

usually that meant going into caves and sewers of my own self-loathing about how bad the writing was, how bad i was, etc.

and then something happened: a crack in the egg, a leg kicked itself out of the jello and then came the rest of me with a wiggle, a jiggle, a bonafide giggle.

not the 'haha' kind of wow that was funny or clever or even true, but something more like the laughter of relief. safety. home.

home.

i like that. and if true, it makes what came before perhaps best described as a homesickness. A gnawing need to return back to oneself even though, by the looks of it, you'd never really left.

maybe that's where the anger comes from? why does this, here, at the corner of me and mine, feel so strange. so wrong.

which makes the flailing about, limbs akimbo, there in the jello, makes sense.

here’s what happened (vague)

I'd found the form of the thing i was writing. it wasn't an essay. it was a letter. so i wrote it to the person, directly.

dear so and so,
hello and how are you. this is a letter and i shall write it as such.

but as i kept going, the flailing returned. i’d somehow found myself stuck once more in the jello, thick, gelatinous and, if i may be so bold, globulous.

found though i briefly was,
lost i had again become.

but i kept writing.

sharing my feelings of lostness in the letter.

to this person who means a lot to me. meant? means.

and then again, kablow, realization. revelation.

i wasn't writing a letter. it was something else. something with its own rules of form and style and constraint.

is it okay to not tell you yet what it was?

a voice in me screams "DONT vaguestack - tell them everything and do it fast"

and i will, in time.
maybe

but who says you have to reveal everything, always?

what if not revealing something is itself the reveal?

all i wanted to say with this post was that finding the form of a thing is a great feeling indeed.

with form comes rules, guidelines, expectations.

and with expectations come the opportunity to defy them.

to zig when one ought to zag.

to subvert.

from form, content follows

I’m drawn especially to weird forms - the stuff that’s art but we don’t realize it yet.

reddit posts, for example, which have a shorthand (OP). cadence.

or amazon reviews with their stars to indicate love.

my fav writer who plays with form is Jennifer Egan. in her book A visit from the goon squad, she's got a chapter that's just a powerpoint presentation made by one of her characters called Great Rock and Roll Pauses.

I looked it up and she's got it on her website as an actual old school presentation. you can hit play. some slides have music.

in the follow up to that book, she wrote The Candy House which has a chapter called See Below that's just emails back and forth between people. see below:

first it's just standard from X to Y. But then she starts adding bcc's - From A, to B, bcc: X, Y, Z.

the bcc tells us so much. There's action there. Decision making.

Adult Swim's deranged infomercials do this too. They take a form we know and fuck with it. My fav is and always will be broomshakalah:

Who do y’all think does this well? Head on over to the comments, themselves an art form, and lemme know

writing for home

i love the idea of writing to make the homesick feeling go away.

how the moment when something hits, clicks, kablows,
you feel,
briefly but forever,
like you’ve arrived back to yourself, home,
lost no longer,
found for now.

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wanna cowrite with other weirdos?

Paid subscribers get access to 2-3x/week sessions of BATWRITE which is a cowriting session during which:

1. I do a standup set using powerpoint slides (15 min)

2. ppl share what they wanna work on (optional) (10 min)

3. we write (35 min)

4. break (5 min)

5. we write (40 min)

6. we talk about how it went (15 min)

We’ve got THREE batwrites this week:

• Tue July 22, 4-6p est

• Thu July 24, 9-11a est

• Sat July 26, 10a-12p est

And two more next week:

• Tue July 29, 4-6p est

• Thu July 31, 10a-12p est

what ppl say about it

After last week’s session, I asked people: “How would you describe the BATWRITE sesh to a friend who is considering joining BATCAVE but is on the fence for some reason?”

their answers make me genuinely consider being a happy man

I'd say to the friend: "Go join it and stop overthinking, dummy!"

A cozy, unpretentious, introvert-friendly hang.

a hangout with literally genius level creatives but they aren't pretentious and you all just kind of vibe out and it makes you feel like you too are a genius level creative, and then you get work done that is better because you believe that about yourself

Just fucking do it. Cool people. Good music. Fun and games and getting things done.

​

A BATWRITE sesh is this It's easy, man. Just show up. Stay quiet if you want, talk if you want. But by god you better write. Especially when that music starts GOING. Fog chaser are you kidding me how can you not write to that stuff?

A BATWRITE sesh is this awesome little writers' hangout space where you get the best kickoff ever from Alex "Little-Guy" Dobrenko: a little icebreaker, a little humor via the world's most incredible slides, a little craft education, and A LOT of profundity and/or vulnerability. And then, we're off to the races! Cheering each other on in whatever writerly pursuit we have on deck for the day. I mean, seriously, if you haven't joined yet, what's stopping you??? Writers. Jokes. Tugged heart strings. Accomplished work. SEAL THE DEAL, PEOPLE!!!