One of the crueler aspects about getting older is that a decade becomes a very real concept. A decade ago I was in my early twenties. I’ve changed since then, but I don’t feel all that different. I’m a more and less recognizable version of the same self. And yet, when I was twenty-two, a decade earlier would have made me twelve. There was nothing to connect those parts of my life. We used to talk in months and years. But now I tell people about things, and it’s a decade apart. I talk about Japan, and Prague, and Chicago. And I’m right there with myself in those moments. But …
By Sundance 2017
I’m at Sundance again this year. The annual tradition that is as close to a college reunion as I’ve ever had in my life. I could write pages on the effect that the gathering has on my psyche: the calming, medicative jealousy of a life not lived. The problem is that the movies I’ve chosen this time have brought me a costly type of introspection. Whether fictional or biopic, I’ve found myself resonating with the most depressing characters. So many drunk reclusive writers! It’s like a genre unto itself. Seeing everyone’s mental turmoil makes mine seem much more manageable, maybe even normal. But does everyone have to be so defective? …
New Old Memories
I’ve started digging out my old ALA posts from years ago. I had started to republish them earlier, and then became distracted in completing line edits for a novel. The years through 2010 should be easy, they were already on the old site. What surprised me in reading this small stretch of time between leaving Prague and getting settled in Chicago (approx June 2008 through August 2008) is how restrained the posts are. I was clearly going through a quarter life crisis and frantically grabbing at anything that could keep me afloat, and yet in the writing I come off as (somewhat) under control. Specifically, the part about the cruise …
Memory
I think only time, and begrudging acceptance (and hopefully eventual appreciation) will be the way that I can accept my relationship with memory. Even now, the anxiety I felt over my lack of control of my own memory has started to subside. It’s obvious to me now that you can’t call on it when you need it. It will return to me of a volition that is out of my control, and the context that it returns under will be fragmented, at best: scattered memories, without a before or after, just moments existing outside of time. In some ways that’s beautiful. It is still maddeningly frustrating. But I’m beginning to …