Back to blogging

A livejournal by any other name...

Nov 15, 2020

“I think it’s time we both got back to blogging,” I said in a twitter comment to my friend Jason, who I didn’t meet until long after we’d both been telling the internet for years all kinds of things we were feeling or thinking or dreaming. Call it whatever you want, but writing my way through whatever it is that’s going on has been a habit as long as I’ve known how to form sentences.

I can stash it away in different corners of scrivener or gdocs or twitters or instagram stories where some or none of you can see it, but there’s little I’d generally declare off-limits to what I’m willing to say out loud. (The obvious boundaries apply and I would advise generally: don’t talk shit about the companies putting food on your table, and don’t say something about a living person — friend or foe or stranger — that you wouldn’t know how to feel OK about should they ask you face-to-face, or whatever equivalent we’re counting in this pandemic, what the fuck you were thinking.)

When I was contemplating how to celebrate turning 40, I decided well in advance that it would be best to plan ahead, way ahead, so that the planning itself became part of the celebration and at least served to distract from cataloging potential downsides. In the wake of the weekend-long parties I had at a rented house in the Hollywood Hills, I decided that in my forties I should lean into this self-preservation technique I’d stumbled into: Where possible, where means provided, plan ahead for what you think you’ll maybe need months from now, a year even. If the turn from my twenties to thirties was for me a deep exhalation — I knew who I was, I knew what I wanted — then this next adult phase could be about being comfortable and established enough in my life that I actually leveraged my privilege and accomplishments in service of what that advance team, even perhaps subconsciously, was sending back signals I should prepare for next.

One of the only self-care investments I’ve made this year — less because I wasn’t willing to spend the time or money on myself but because I simply couldn’t feel safe or calm enough to dream bigger than an indulgent meal delivery — was that in late summer I enrolled in the author Alexander Chee’s two-part seminar on essay writing. I put it on the calendar for early October and promptly forgot about it. I haven’t taken a writing class in a long, long time — I think probably not since early in my LA days when I took a series of screenwriting courses through MediaBistro. That’s probably 13, maybe 14 years ago. I’ve done a lot less writing over this last decade than the one before, either because I was writing more at work, or because work itself moved so squarely to the foreground of my everyday life that I had little energy and less focus at the end of each day to dig back in for more creative output (and also, frankly, to get back on a computer after already being on one all day).

I had no way, except that 2020 has taught us all (again) to expect nothing will be as we planned, to know that by the time I actually took Alex’s class I’d be in the midst of a dramatic sabbatical of sorts, two thousand miles away from home, ensconced in a multi-hued midwestern Fall. I’m back in LA now, in a reconstituted guest room that I’ve belatedly converted into a proper home office in no small part so that I can also rediscover a non-work writing routine. I took copious notes during the two sessions of the essay seminar, sensing I think that I was still far too in the throes of a very present traumatized state of mind to simply remember what felt significant, and am making my way back through those notes along with Alex’s incredibly generous letters and prompts he sent his students.

My view as I took the second essay seminar…

I wasn’t ready right away to actually write, but I desperately wanted to have faith that would return, so until it came back I instead followed one piece of housekeeping homework and began making a detailed index of all the essay-writing I’ve already done in my life, looking for what I might collect or expand or revisit. To state the incredibly obvious point I somehow hadn’t fully grasped until I did this: it’s a long list. Alex encouraged us to be in a way our own diligent archivist — both to aid in writing (consulting our phone’s photo albums, searching our email inboxes for key phrases or dates, interviewing relevant people to fact-check our own fallible impressions) and to then assemble that writing into larger bodies of work. I know I haven’t found or even really gone looking for what is probably the majority of words I’ve poured into various media over the last 20+ years, but I’ve got a much better sorted set of recurring themes (and one-offs) to now set about doing…something with.

Reading writing about the process of writing is the most generous gift an audience might bother to bestow on a self-indulgent writer, I think. Maybe I’ll spin off from here more finished essays into their own Substack, and I promise the truly rambling notes to myself about what I’m doing or not are locked away in their own google doc drawer (minus the occasional angsty tweet). But I probably need to do more of this, too.

A couple things in the meantime, because I am also lucky enough to have a decent little platform at the day job where I can stash thinky thoughts even when I have absolutely no idea what will happen in the future:

I had some feelings about Pearl Jam’s 1992 MTV Unplugged performance and how much Eddie Vedder’s righteous anger about abortion rights blew my mind equally at age 15 as it does now.
My favorite movie I saw in 2019 is finally coming out — Sound of Metal. I talked to Riz Ahmed about his exquisite turn as a recovering addict, punk metal drummer who rapidly loses his hearing. The movie will be on Amazon Prime Video starting December 4.
I also got to have an absurdly long conversation with the writer Michael Chabon on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, his epic Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Nazis and wearing masks and also a queer kid and his bff inventing a new kind of hero. It is finally, finally, allegedly, making its way to a screen (Showtime) in the hopefully not too delayed future, but it was Michael’s stories of actors who were considered for earlier adaptations that legitimately made me screech WHAT?! at him during the interview.
Did you know I like Schitt’s Creek? lololololol anyway Dan Levy was kind enough to come back for one more podcast interview in EW’s BINGE series, where we talk about Schitt’s sixth season and the Emmys, and you can listen to that and all the many other hours we’ve spent rambling about this show wherever you do that kind of thing.
Relatedly, among the many stellar queer entertainers and artists who participated in our special pride audio series is in fact author Alexander Chee.
Did you know if you connect your twitter to Substack it will show you all the people you follow who have newsletters and let you sign up en masse? That was genuinely helpful. I haven’t been much more successful at reading than writing for the last six months but I can feel little bits of my brain waking up so I’m looking forward to more of that, too. If you’ve got one I missed, let me know.