rancim

[rancim]

11/9

Right now we're writing pretty disassociated, that's the problem. It's fine for non-fiction, but sitting down today and trying to write an honest to goodness story was difficult, even more difficult than I ever remembered. Is it because I am no longer writing in my "voice?" Or maybe I'm rushing like I need to prove myself well? I should try to take it slower.

It was feeling ridiculous that led him away from his suicide attempt. He had been ready, had been committed, had filled the chimney starter with briquettes and waited quietly for them to smoulder, to fill his sealed room with smoke. But he made the mistake of scrolling through subreddit threads of people inquiring about methods to kill themselves painlessly while he waited, and he was struck by the transparent agonies on display. Hundreds of replies, hundreds begging to be put out of their misery, and all in demonstrably worse circumstances than him. What the fuck am I doing, he thought to himself, before tearing off the tape and opening the windows of his room. Later, when his mom wakes up, she will ask why the house reeks of a hickory smell, and he'll say that he fucked up making barbecue chips in the air fryer.

[rancim]

10/26

It was harder to conceptualize the suicide when exposed to living, breathing people that reciprocated your interest/love to you. It was easy when you were alone, one end of the tubing into the exhaust pipe, another into the window of the car, cracked slightly open. You were slow with the sealing, with pressing the tape in the gap so the air wouldn't escape. You had time with your thoughts and it all seemed so maudlin, the killing yourself, and yet in the face of coming up with an alternative, you just drew blanks. But something has to come around, you told yourself. You don't know how or why but it has to, you felt. You place your finger against the ignition button of the car, wondering if pressing it would be easier or harder than the living.

[rancim]

10/26

I have made so many useless things a fundamental part of my personality. Oh, that's the guy that builds Gundams. Oh, he reads and stuff. Guess he likes manga? I think to myself, why didn't I make something like being a programmer or working hard emblematic of my personality. But then, even with deficiencies of character people find a way to keep on living. it is not like something is holding me back.

[rancim]

10/22

At the wedding he felt unbearably lonely, but he didn't want to be a downer so he drank, drank, drank. He'd walk up to the bartender who just started pouring gin and tonics when he saw him, and so he wandered around boozy, cheerily. The couples dance, he whooped. The slow dance part, he crooned. He laughed when they smeared their faces with cake, and he caught up with friends he has not seen for a very long time, and he did his best to elevate the air with joy. Later he'll go back to his apartment, to the spare room with all of the points of ventilation taped shut, and stare at the hibachi grills he had bought, wondering whether this is the time to have some verve.

[rancim]

i sleep better in other people's homes. So the hiding in the basement thing is not a pervert thing, but a mental health one.

[rancim]

10/20

I just didn't have the confidence for it. We can harp on and on and on about potential, sure, but we're 34 and yet to see the ball rolling. At a point we just have to accept who we are. Every time I write I think to myself how I'm contributing to the garbage pile because let's face it, there's so much bad writing out there and what we've got isn't very much better. They say that giving up is a dog's death but have you ever imagined a dog dying in the worst way and thinking to yourself, wow, at least he doesn't have to go through it anymore?

[rancim]

10/18

Has the age of worrying begun? Little physical inabilities I attributed to nothingness now terrify me. I've read things, people dying in their 40s, an age I'm approaching closer and closer to. The reality of a death at my age has shifted from a tragic and unexplainable thing to a thing that could have been taken care of if it were handled earlier. A pain in the chest a portending heart attack? Is the plaque building up in my arteries? Are the cracking joints signs of an eventual inability to carry myself physically? Oh, and to go to a doctor only to confirm the suspicion that the aging body is trying to give up on me. Oh no, oh no.

[rancim]

10/18

How does one go about unwasting one's life? He knew the insignificance of the things he was doing, the ways in which he wasted the scant amount of time defined by his mortality. He knew he was watching his years swirl around a drain, amounted by the unmemorable. But at this late point in the game he figured he was settled, and unfortunately, he had chosen to be the kind of person that dwells in the dirt, the mud. To pull yourself up at this point would be hard, and he didn't know if he had the reservoir of energy to embark on such a thing.

[rancim]

10/5

I am 34 now

it's real weird because I feel the same as I did last year. It is very terrifying to live a life in which you can look back on a previous year and be like yep, nothing changed. No big developments to speak of. Whatever new things we've picked up, in retrospect, do not feel significant enough to merit celebration, and when those around me choose to try to pick me up, to celebrate what I have, it rings desultory, it feels like a hollow consolation. Lately my breathing has felt constrained. Is this what a purposeless life is? The ever-constant acknowledgment that you're slowly dying, the pinprick sensation of your skin, the tension felt in the muscles, a body subconsciously prepping itself for the grain of the confines of a wooden coffin? Something's gotta give, I keep saying as the maggots nestle themselves further into the burrows of my body.

[rancim]

9/7

Gotta come to accept that we never really outgrew our teenaged world view well into adulthood, have to accept that yeah this is the way I view things, as infantile as it is. Not everything happens for a reason or not everything is for the better or not everything has a purpose, to say the least. Had fed too much into the gen x produced media of my childhood obsessing over the need for a life outside of banality and am now in a position where I'm far too envious of those with stability and confidence in the menial and glowing happy dumb babies. Ah, I hate that I never outgrew the idea, now dwelled too well in my heart, that none of it is worth it. That life is an exercise in banality until you die. That whatever little happinesses you manage to scrap together in the dirt you better hold onto with dear life, never let it be wrenched from your hands despite how much you will be kicked and punched and denigrated to let it go because that's all you've really got.

[rancim]

8/13

We spent a lot of time just reading straight garbage this weekend, all the whole returning and rereading a dense, long passage from The Trial struggling with an uncle from the country who has a lawyerly connection but doesn't and aaaaaah. But anyway, trash, schlock. I can't even qualify myself as enjoying schlock, but it's something I'll read regardless. And I won't take my time on it, I won't appreciate the art or the paneling or the dialogue or even the story, I will just speed through to see what egregiously dumb thing someone will cram in for the sake of shock or surprise or whatever emotion one is trying to convey as they throw shit at the window, seeing what will stick. But in a way, I appreciate schlock for it's honesty, for its refusal to contort itself into something more than it actually is. It knows it's bad but it's having fun. But one has to ask themselves if something can retain an aesthetic value in the general high-minded critic type when one gleefully wears the value of fun on its sleeve. Like Chungking Express is a beautifully shot, thoughtful film but my god is it boring; by that same measure, the sheer insanity of schlock is at the least engaging, but maybe at this point my mind has rotted from the imbibement of so much schlock that I can't meaningfully engage nor create things of slower, more mature aesthetic value???

[rancim]

8/12

Maybe I've leaned too far hard into the notion of storytelling as sounding organic? I read some short fiction and it feels like the flow of the story's narrator is cut short when they come to describe all of these flowery things the person they're interacting with is wearing or the timbre of their voice or whatever. Meaning to say that in that instant, one begins to wonder in what tense does the narrator exist in? As in to say, if a piece of fiction is a dialogue between story teller and listener, then in what point of time are we interacting with them, and doesn't the storyteller set that necessary boundary? For example, if the storyteller has time to tell us of the minute habits and the strange things the person is wearing and their textures and the sounds they make and so on and so forth, it is with the implication that they are telling us a story that has already HAPPENED to them, and for me i'm trying to figure out why that is much less interesting to me. For me I prefer the story, if the narrator is an active participant in that story, to be something actuated by their voice; as if they are laying the bricks as we go along, as if we don't know what it is they'll be running into as well. Do these writers take note of the clothes people are wearing as soon as they meet them, noting their scents, the fabric, bargain bin or primo stuff? No, I don't think so. How awkward it would be for someone to take stock of us in silence. I feel like the rest of us, when we meet people, note broader strokes of physicality, and take more measured observations in the interim of our meeting, the sitting around, the waiting. I always thought I was obsessed with speed and compression, but rhythm seems to be also important to me when telling a story.

[rancim]

8/8

The disposability of culture makes me hesitant to add to the discard, the garbage. Enough with solemn, serious contemplations on middle class nothing, I find myself saying as I read and read and read. Should we not try to make happier things in a world we already know feels predisposed to cruelty and sadness? Ah, to be able to bombard ones self with sound and image and production value at any given notice, what's the point of art taking it slow???

[rancim]

7/31

dad in hospital again, blood pressure too high last couple of days so we're thinking mini-stroke? couldn't stand on his own, pissed in his chair. Called EMTs to take him to hospital, can't even attend to him in hospital because I have COVID. All I have is anger. I know it was his choice to go to the party and I know that as such that's all on him consequence-wise but still. I want to find those sick Canadians and wring their necks. I want to find the Panabo Associate and curse them, all of them. What can one do with all this anger?

[rancim]

7-20

I’m trying not to delve into the notion that there are necessarily Giant Generational Differences or whatever, but the comment threads on the internet have gotten weirder. I mean, they’ve always been weird right, always someone commentating on something someone is doing or how they’re looking or making comments about a person that they would never make in real life, that’s always been there, but what I haven’t seen is this weird sense of intimacy that shouldn’t exist in a comment, because you have never met that person in your actual, real life.

Sometime in the early ‘10s it felt like we were confusing vulnerability online with intimacy where there is none. Just because I share something with someone that feels like an intimate detail doesn’t presuppose an actual relationship, but now it feels like commentators, or I should rather say rabid fans, hmm. Well. Actually, now that I type it out, the fan-creative relationship has always been weird, maybe I’m just not privy to it because I never paid much attention to it in the first place. Never really played around on forums past high school, never engaged on facebook pages, never tried to message or email a hero, none of that. In actuality, if there were no social media for me to engage with, I probably would have gone my merry way never truly knowing about fan-creative relationships in the first place. Oh, what a strange world I can peer into.

[rancim]

7/19

Sometimes he would get so swept up in anger or sadness or desperation that he would find himself moving/acting in ways he normally wouldn't, in fact it felt almost like it wasn't him doing it on self-reflection after the manic episode had passed, like he would take a big sharp kitchen knife and run the tip of it down the length of his wrist and imagine just the skin breaking and the blood letting and everything going dark going all relaxed and he wouldn't do it but it certainly scared him how close the knife is getting to the skin these days, far closer than it used to be when he was younger and he would imagine it but be like nah no thanks, now he feels like the whole idea of staying alive will lead one to meaning as long as they're willing feels all too precious and unreal

[rancim]

7-16

I had spent a lot of time trying to figure out a new novel to read before going to sleep, because these days I’m trying to be better about consuming things that at the least I think will actively contribute to my development as a writer, rather than simply soaking in the pockets of internet ephemera that do nothing for me but present strange little tidbits of trivia to present to friends when I have nothing to talk about (did you know there’s a whole subreddit of pictures devoted to cars fucking dragons, I will say to a friend when I feel we are on the verge of emotional vulnerability).

I tried my best to follow my writing professor’s advice post-grad, and instead of trying to be published, simply thought about writing and formalism and what my writing meant and what my writing could be. This ended up with me reading a lot and saving the recommendations of books anthologized in the canon of small presses, big presses and everything in between. A random blogger I thought was pretty. A friend who mostly read things circumstantial to their own experience. Again, anything and everything.

And then I started to ask myself do I really like reading and writing or do I simply like the things that adhere to my particular personality? I would read critically lauded things and think ah, what a bore, but I’d read a thing with no press, no accolades, panned on goodreads or whatever and think ah, how interesting! How interesting! Read enough and everything starts to blur. I only delved then into the writers who appealed to me, be it because of emotional resonance or interesting story concepts or stylistic flair or more recently, what I’ve come upon, is the idea of compression. Just an ear towards rhythm, a story without a wasted word, where no single sentence felt redundant.

Now in my thirties I find myself less interested in the new and more invested in reading more and more of the writers that I’ve managed to vibe with during that wild, undisciplined time in my twenties, when I amassed books from used bookstores that sounded even vaguely interesting, whose first pages were read, set aside, now a drop in an ocean of a closet of which I do not open because all of those books tend to bum me out. Rather than venture into that closet for new things to read, I spent 2 hours googling what books the people I read like reading, because now again, to reiterate in my thirties, I guess I just want to see the people that affected the people that affected my life. I’m more interested in just my inner workings, my small circle of influences.

So in conclusion, rather than start anything new, I just ended up drifting in and out of the online sphere before downloading some novellas that George Saunders was into and then feeling sleepy, deciding to sleep without getting any real reading done. But then I had realized, oh no, did you do your writing quota? I’m trying to be better about writing too. Even boring things, even minutiae, I need to try to write something when I can’t get the lead out on the fiction front I’ve been trying to commit to, so yes, even the dumb act of trying to pick a book before bed, let’s write about that shall we?

I’m always worried about whether I’ve improved upon the self that I was a decade ago or whatever. Without a successful track record to cite, books published or awards won or what have you, it’s easy to think that maybe you’re just going in circles and you’ve plateaued skill-wise. I went onto my old blog that I ran in college, its prose feeling as if written by a completely different person, a Haruki Murakami wannabe without an ear for rhythm and intonation. I feel assured that for my lack of accomplishment, at the least I can say I approved. Here’s hoping that’s good enough to take to the grave.