Writer's Diary

3/22/26

Lately, it feels like I’m battling my brain, which necessarily means battling things that hijack my brain. My life is fun, ostensibly and unpredictable, incredibly busy, incredibly social, incredibly precarious. And as a consequence, I find myself wishing for the first time in my life for something like a 9 to 5, some kind of prosaic, predictable, safe life. I’m half in awe and half aghast that I’ve made it this far without a trustworthy salary—that I’ve been so nourished by, derived so much energy, from the loud, inner idea that I might be or am a great artist.

I think about Walter Benjamin, a bourgeois who wanted to be a bourgeois, but never wanted to work except read and write, and mostly to read, or maybe more than read, to buy books, to live surrounded by books.

Joyce was a bit like that too. Joyce was a language tutor; like many other writers I’ve gotten by on tutoring too. But it’s not substantial. It’s not rock-like. I’ve never even had the patience to apply for grants, nor are most grants open to me, nor will they be. I’ve made do. I’ve gotten lucky. I’ve fallen into things, fallen out of things. I’ve sold things. But I never seemed to be one of those people who could time the market right or grab some crypto right before it went crazy or some NFT or some stock. (The only thing that’s ever worked for me is buying and holding boring stocks, incremental gains like in my work.)

It feels like there’s some either demonic or angelic pressure being exerted on me so that I stay at work, at the desk, on task (I actually think more angelic than demonic). My life at times really does feel like some weird test (one where I have been given immense gifts but no good fortune; heaped up with beauty, never granted security—I guess you could say I’ve been granted the romantic’s life).

Maybe I chose it, my soul chose it before my birth.

For a long time, I had a lot of scorn, automatic, boring scorn for so-called normies, because I assumed that everyone who did not live like I lived must be unhappy or self-deceiving or lacking in Heideggerian resolve or something like that. But I had it completely backwards. It takes a great deal of humility not to try to live out a fantasy and live far from the crowd; not everyone is supposed to be a poet, flaneur, seducer. The cost of my many seductions and adventures and poems is complex, but not entirely heroic.

The problem with being greedy with experience, with learning, with pouring things into yourself is that you disconnect yourself from the radiance of the world at the same time, to some degree. An artist plays a very dangerous game with themselves because they harvest everything early. Stuff the granaries in the middle of summer. When winter comes, there might not be anything left.

I have not been willing to sacrifice a little experience along the way in order to have a little peace. I’ve always wanted my narrative to be interesting. I’ve always done the thing that has the highest potential aesthetic value, which is not always to say the most moral or the most logical—maybe a bit afraid of quiet moments, meditative moments, being alone (if not loneliness).

In a sense, I’ve jostled about like someone who, underneath, is afraid of death; who is afraid of being alone with the overpresent, underpruined thought of death.

If I was afraid, then I would not have to try so hard to always stay in motion, to seek pleasure, to seek praise. I would not be afraid either to be old or even to fail, nor to be disliked.