I spent several hours this afternoon posting pictures. Posting pictures is a way of keeping them somewhere I know I can come back to them. I can see things I couldn’t before: a false smile, a friend I didn’t value enough, how hideous a favorite pair of pants was. I got back on social media last summer and before that hadn’t posted any personal content in about three years. In those years I took hundreds of photos and never looked at most of them again, mostly of my ex and our cat. Going back through them is painful but also a good reminder of how quickly you forget what your life used to be like. It’s too easy to feel like today, yesterday, the past few months, is all there is.

There was another shooting today, a couple of hours ago. College campus, two dead, several critically injured. I feels dazed and unsteady. It’s been a horrible week. Game of Thrones and the Avengers movie making my timeline suck shit, et cetera. When I came into work this afternoon we all sat in our cubicles silently. What even is there to say?

The past few years have been very shitty, from my personal microcosm to the world in general. I don’t know why I still care about keeping a record. Mostly it just makes me sad. But I think it has something to do with how likely it seems that it will all be negated in a shocking act of violence, either the slow kind or the quick. Why bother to cull the excess (delete the blurry stuff)? Even the accidental screenshots are proof of life.

When things seem unimaginably bad, I find myself looking at all the photos I have of houses, which I’ve been taking since I was in high school. An overgrown front yard in Oakland, a collapsed duplex in St. Louis, turkeys across from my dad’s place in Jersey, the cheaply erected condos on my block in Bedstuy covered in half-assed snow. The first short story I ever wrote that I was proud of was called “Little Blue Houses” and it started just this way: I saw a house, I pictured life in it, and I made something that felt human. It feels important that I remember how to do that, especially on days like this.

If you’re one of the seven people who caught it, I had a post up yesterday about smoking weed every day. I deleted it because who cares about that. Posting on the internet is new to me and I like it but I’m still sorting out which of my thoughts are interesting and which aren’t.

Posting more on the internet than the occasional self-promo is good for me because it makes me write every day. Like most writers, I knew that writing was what I wanted to do with my life pretty young. Also like most writers, I go through spells of not writing, agonizing about not writing, writing garbage, and thinking about how much more bearable I would be as a person if I could just shut the fuck up, though honestly all of these moods have improved a lot since I got out of school.

Most of my friends who write poetry and fiction don’t blog or even post on Twitter. I get that language can feel sacred, especially if you’ve spent years studying it. But writing a lot of maybe-nonsense and making it available to other people for free doesn’t hurt anyone. To me posting is less of a disservice to your writing than sending your poem to an Established Magazine and letting them lop off lines here or there.

I think of posting every day as part of my general effort to enunciate. I’m practicing saying “Hi, this is Serena” clearly and crisply on the phone at work, and I’m practicing putting coherent thoughts on the Internet in the hopes that I’ll get better at making myself understood.

He called his grand scheme sophiarchism and it was ludicrous. As he prepared the oils, butters, silver instruments, and paint, he outlined a system of government where the only voters were holders of social science PhDs. The notion that the governing power should be concentrated in the hands of capable specialists. Heavy stuff. She wasn’t entirely sure she had the right approach but something seemed… unpatriotic about it.

He approached her with an emory board and lazily she shifted her hand so that it lay on the armrest of the reclining chair. He began to file her pinkie gently. That he had a grand scheme was lovely, she thought. That he had a scheme at all. His polo was mint green, his apron pure white, his khaki pants straight to his strong-looking legs. He worked cocoa butter into her skin. When he hit the spot between her index and thumb bones, tense as a broken wing with carpal tunnel, she moaned. “Oh,” he said softly, as if surprised, “Lisa, let it go.” When the manicure was over he brought her a thimble of espresso, jet black in a doll-size cup.

—

I wrote this last spring and I still think about it occasionally because it perfectly encapsulates how I feel that I have something to say but have no idea what it is. I know I should just shut the fuck up… but…

Looking back on the piece I can tell I was thinking about intimate situations in which people who aren’t in the habit of listening have to listen. What might make them want to listen (sex appeal, physical pleasure, color). Also about the kinds of jobs people who might have been academics end up doing. Also about hands and the innumerable things they do. How much I love to encounter an idea out of context, in the wild.

It’s occurred to me that this is a terrible piece because it’s riddling, but not in the satisfying way. “Write poems, not puzzles” is deeply solid criticism I have received. But real life, at least to me, seems mostly to consist of unsatisfying puzzles and non-epiphanies. At least in writing you can style the riddle so that it feels good in your brain. I have a not-very-coherent thought about writing as ASMR, about head-scratchers and head-scratchers. After all, what’s the difference between something that’s ambient and something that’s vague?

Intention, I guess. But why write (more) useless bullshit?

Why not, I guess. Someday someone might pick it up and realize it’s music.

Where I work it’s clear that a functioning IT department is not really a priority. They already outsourced IT for the most problematic devices, the printers, and word on the street is that the belt is tightening. Already getting in touch with IT is a nightmare. If you need remote access to something, or a working mouse, or a generated password, you have to fill out a ticket and get someone above you to sign off on it, and if you’re lucky they’ll will send up a guy (and if the problem is really serious, two guys). For the most part, they won’t be able to help you. There’s no frustration like when a computer won’t do what you want, and to fix the problem you have to do exactly what the IT tech says. From my one high-school summer working in IT, I can say that a surprising number of folks don’t take well to that.

Which is all to say—Jason, I see you and I honestly have no idea how you do it. How the fuck did you find the license key for that ancient version of Adobe Acrobat? Where did you get that clean-looking extra keyboard? How do you maintain that perfectly good-natured demeanor, for Christ’s sakes even a smile, when most of your job is telling people that what they need is either impossible or going to take a long time? I genuinely admire the way you approach each new problem with such confidence, even if it’s obvious to everyone that there’s no solution, only tedious workarounds. It takes real grace and patience to do what you do, and even then people are going to grumble. We blame you for the company’s weird computer workings. None of it seems to get to you. Nothing but respect for that.

I never learned how to apply eyeliner correctly and I have thin lips, so the only makeup I ever really got into was doing my eyebrows. It started late, in college, because my roommate had a makeup routine. She never showered but she always looked like she had her shit together. I experimented with all sorts of products (my favorite was this brush/pencil in grayish brown). In my last year of college I had a bad mental health spell and started drawing them on darker and thicker. They had to be symmetrical, but they aren’t naturally symmetrical, and in the end I looked like a cartoon character. When I got to grad school I stopped doing them altogether. As the only woman in my four-person cohort, and because I felt increasingly comfortable in more masculine clothing, it didn’t make sense to be painting my face every day.

These days I live in a city where looking put together at the supermarket is a real thing. I’ll go six months or longer without putting on any makeup, and then one day I’ll be at the drugstore and buy a crayon and suddenly eyebrows will be my look for the season. You would think I would have figured out the face I want to present to the world by now, but I haven’t. I guess that’s just how it goes.

The reason you can’t write erotica is because no matter what you do, it comes out as flat, factual, and sort of creepy, even if you think it’s hot and romantic while you’re working on it. This is a shame because your sole career aspiration by the end of high school was to become Anaïs Nin. Unfortunately the best you can achieve at present is a weird, cold voyeuristic tone.

The problem is that you are a literal person to the point of rigidity. You may love to read figurative language, the more florid and rococo the better, but when you sit down, you have enough trouble just getting the idea onto the fucking page. Also, your eye for metaphor is terrible. For about a week you’ve been trying to describe the way the sun comes through train tracks on an overpass, how the light checkers when a train goes by, and “like a glittering snake” is all you’ve come up with. It’s bad. Don’t write it.

You have to play to your strengths in this life. If you’re not witty or even necessarily “creative” you can still write powerfully. Just describe the thing honestly, in as much detail as possible, until it becomes as strange as a repeated word in your mouth. That’s the whole concept of defamiliarization, a trick you didn’t really learn until your MFA because they don’t want the academics and hobbyists to know about it. Everything is interesting. Everyone is interesting. All you have to do is describe.

You’ve been spending a lot of time in crowdfunding Facebook groups, traveling back through people’s public profiles as they chart years of homelessness, parenthood, illness, kink, substance abuse, whatever. That’s the kind of writing that feels urgent right now. If you’re being fully honest, it’s the kind of writing you’ve always loved.

Posting on the internet is closer to poetry than any other genre of writing. Posting is fragmented, encoded, as much about style as content, and it’s impossible to talk about. But studying poetry didn’t make you a good poster lol, and it certainly didn’t help you write more or better. You’re still liable to say just a little too much, to ruin whole sentences by appending redundant clauses. Every time you sit down to work on a piece of prose, you trim the previous day’s writing by a hundred words—you can’t stop yourself. You systematically remove adverbs and gerunds, and what you’re left with reads suspiciously like a police report.

You don’t touch the poems, though. Your poems are flourishes, conceived and completed almost instantaneously. If a poem “needs revision” you might spend months on it, but inevitably you will chuck it in the trash. Even though you know better, you believe that the good ones come out perfectly formed the first time, and in all honesty, everything you’ve published has followed that rule. Anything that needs tinkering, sinks.

Your poems aren’t very long. They never have been. You can’t control when they occur to you. If you’re lucky, you might get two a month. That’s 24 in a year at best. Maybe thirty words each. Is that enough writing to produce and still consider yourself as a writer (aka your excuse for not doing things like exercising, volunteering, and working hard at your day job)? No… you can always start a blog, though. On it you can write about anything you want.