October 21, 2010 - Breakfast

The arrival of fall makes things serious. It means I must stop with the crackers.

In a few weeks we'll be back in the system. Year three. I am organized into multiple interconnected todo lists now. Those words--"to"; "do"--pretentiously smushed together because we don't have the space and time to keep them separated; if we had that time and space we wouldn't need todo lists, would we? Todolists.

Everyone has their system. Folders, sheets of paper, Post-its appended to the lower corner of a computer monitor, Evernote. I use org-mode, which is not just a todo system but a complete hypertextual publishing system that integrates with the text editor I've used for nearly 20 years. I've spent more time learning it than using it.

And this website I suppose is a system. People have been wondering why I stopped, but have you ever spent a great deal of time with a robot? It gets tiresome. It's a boring relationship. The robot takes in all your thoughts and feelings and outputs a graph. It's just not enough, not compared to the warm affection returned by a bowl of pudding.

The return to the fertility clinic in the next few weeks--I am dreading it, but it's a calm dread. This feels like the proper moment, the beginning of fall. We've been to a farm; we've had a big cocktail party for many of our friends. Now my wife is to be plumped with chemicals until her eggs are like grape clusters, and my sperm is to be ejected from a needle into the most promising of those eggs, as it floats in a dish. I imagine the egg reclined in a rowboat, umbrella extended above, a bit languorous. Up swims the sperm, in his fin-de-siècle bathing costume. The egg in her petticoats invites him aboard with practiced indifference. What follows is clumsy--the boat rocks; the whole thing is blurry, uncertain, slightly terrifying.

("You'll probably get pregnant," the doctor said. The doctor wears small, attractive shoes. "This will work.")

Thank God I no longer work on Broadway. I've been thinking a great deal about my last five years, working in zineland. It was supposed to teach me something, and it did. I learned a great deal about writing as a practice, as a production process. How literature and tone are engineered, the methods of quality assurance in place to maintain quality. I learned about the complicated interplay of guilt, ideology, and ego that can motivate people to action in spite of sanity and self-interest. I am still learning about that. But basically I am realizing it was a bad job. Not all bad, but pretty bad.

That's fine. Most jobs are bad. But it was a bad job, and I can't have another one. People don't understand my current career trajectory, building little websites and doing odds and ends. They are asking me what I'll do next, and I'm realizing that very often they are trying to tell me what to do next. Which I understand; that's how they satisfy their dreams, by inviting other people to share in them.

Weight: 314 lbs