chopsticks in the piano lounge

and some thoughts to make this blog maybe less baffling

Back here writing at 10:40am on another Wednesday, — I write these posts the day before I schedule them, usually, — and I woke up late today. Not late for anything, mind you. But later than usual. In the couple minutes I’ve been awake, I’ve decided that all I really want is to sit here and write some strange newsletter zine; I want to write fiction driven by poetry; I want to write stories that are not based in any kinds of fact.

I do enjoy research, vibes updates, whatever you want to call it. I think they’re important— but I also want to write about the world, the relationships we have with one another; I want to write Adventures; I want to write Romances; Dive Bars and Late Night Conversations; Breakfasts Shared With Coffee and Conversations with Friends (oh wait); but the truth is a person can only share so much of their personal life before it becomes a public life, and so there needs to be some sort of an unreality buffer placed in-between. And fiction is a nice buffer. One of the best.

Writing make-believe is a drug unlike any other. There’s a reason why every fiction writer with a blog or a newsletter can only seem capable of writing about fiction and about the craft of fiction, — they’re junkies! They can’t stop thinking about it. Writing fiction makes me feel like a junkie, too, and I know that. Whenever I’m in a consistent fiction practice, I sit idly whenever I’m not writing, whenever I’m out and about town, whenever I’m sitting talking at friends’ places, all I’m really waiting on is the chance to write again. It really is a drug. There’s nothing quite like it.

So the goal here, with this blog, is to write on the world from direct experience, made into some sort of strange, magical art, — Morley Musick’s City Mouse for N+1 is a remarkable, fully-realized version of this idea; — a writing as painting scenes; a writing as a magnifying glass to consider all these mundane dynamics in our lives; a writing which takes personal stories and mixes them with fantasies to create a slightly baffling but comfortable form; whatever you want to call what that is, that’s what I want to do. And don’t get me wrong: I love writing non-fiction too. Researching is fun, I feel like a wizard when I manage to research well (it’s not terribly often), but I feel less comfortable doing research than I do just sitting here writing words for you to read.

I’m not saying I’m switching to anything besides writing this sort of stream-of-consciousness thing which I’m writing to you right now, but I remain having a hard time trusting anything besides my own personal experiences and that makes competing with journalists and actual thinkpiece writers rather uncomfortable. If I’m being honest here, I mostly want to write about the weather from my bedroom window.

And besides, the internet of news is a dramatic and manic place but that doesn’t remain quite true for our individual lives. Our day-to-days are oftentimes slow and plodding along the same avenues, the same pathways. I want to write about people in the world in the way they live in the world, and not just about current events, — but all the same it remains that current events are increasingly subsuming our worlds entirely... so it remains a real dilemma.

But no matter what, I feel like we all have some sort of responsibility to interpret the world as it’s moving like nervous clockwork around us, and this blog is my little interpretation of time passing. Just to get a grasp on thing, for myself and maybe for you to help in your own grasp. Because it feels like the world’s changing with every hour, doesn’t it? We’re moving steadily through all the gradients of colors on a color wheel, each shade of yellow into red, green into blue, every shade with every passing year, and we didn’t even realize.

My idea for this newsletter is a mixed cocktail of these three purposes:

• (1) Biweekly update newsletters and podcasts give a nice feeling of two feet on the ground, weekly or biweekly updates and roundups and (in the good ones) considered takes of the most recent topics circulating.

• (2) Fiction’s purpose, in my mind at least, is to relate to shared human experience and bring us all together under the umbrella of the realities of our predicament here of being people. The same goes for personal essays, though in a decidedly less fictionalized way. But all the same, isn’t there some tad of exaggeration in every personal essay?

• (3) Zines, on the other hand, pull postmodern fiction (in a Pynchon vein), poetry, and comic art together through the national underground music circuits, into a sort of zany performance art to be quickly felt out and distributed like a mix tape. Some of the most intellectually adventures people I’ve met have been local jazz musicians, country singers, punk artists (thinking here of Eat Turf’s drummer, who I shared many a porches with in the Madison music scene, a large leather clad guy who only smoked American Spirit blacks but also majored in Latin and read Rimbaud in his free time), and so naturally there’s certainly a tremendous brilliance to be found in your local bookstore’s zine shelf. Honestly, if you haven’t checked it out, you should, — some of the best books are oftentimes a one-of-fifty copies limited release, stapled together in someone’s apartment.

My theory that I’m going to be testing out here, biweekly, for at least the next five years, is that I can manage some coherent overlap in the above three formats.

So this blog is going to be a work in progress for a while. I’ve accepted that by now. But at least it’s my work-in-progress and no one else’s, — and I don’t expect Puck or any other online pub to come knocking on my inbox anytime soon, nor do I want them to. I’m comfortable here with you in this space. A regular newsletter is a nice personal project; I can follow my own thinking as it changes and evolves and I can share that with others. What else could a writer ever want?

Here’s an example of what I mean:

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chopsticks in the piano lounge

Someone is playing the piano in the lounge and the audience revolts and throws him out on his ass out the door where the only thing playing is the wind. He walks back and forth outside the restaurant for a moment. The bar had been a shod anyways.

Not that he was even remotely skilled at piano to begin with, not that he knew a single chord, a single seventh, he still believes he put on a good show, so he shrugs and says “entertainment is…” to himself. He only played one renditions of chopsticks over and over again, with receding softness, underneath the rolling breathing polite conversation filling the air like oregano in such a place as this, and until he started playing the only song he knew, a late Woody Guthrie song, with an increasing aggression that turned the place into crickets.

If he were in their place, the place of the patrons enjoying fine cuisine, he would have appreciated the humor behind this stint, they would have appreciated the passion. Would they have clapped? Listening to chopsticks played softly beneath expensive wine bottles clinking and white pasta dishes served, it was almost ironic enough to work. And the Woody Guthrie song he only played because the patrons in their dresses and suits kept looking over at him. They hadn't understood. Perhaps it had been the singing. Perhaps it had been the lyrics. He looked inside at the patrons still eating. One glances nervously at him outside. Did they feel targeted by the words? He wondered. And that’s why he was grabbed in a headlock by the bouncer and tossed out the door?

Inside the restaurant, the owner had come by the piano where he had been playing, to point him to the door, — please, the owner had said, our patrons don’t like to hear this kind of song, we’re losing money if you’re doing that, and the pianist couldn’t tell if the owner had meant chopsticks or the Woody Guthrie song, — but he had heard two of the barbacks talking excitedly about it. But he walks now outside the glass restaurant on the corner, he heals his soul a small bit by fuming to himself, spinning on his boot heels on the slush of early winter, and decides to go home under the cloud of his own frustration and distilling tensions, to sleep soundly beneath his bedsheets.

But someone stops him when he decides to go home finally. "You, you were the one playing chopsticks, yeah?" Says some Burly Zach with his hand out.

"Sure." The pianist snags that hand up in a shake.

"That was good."

"No, it wasn't."

“Where’re you off to?" Burly Zach asks.

"Just home."

Inside, the hostess walks back and forth between the table and the booths. Not peeping from behind anything but standing firmly in the center of a wide-pane window, looking over a table where a a middle aged couple with lint-rolled dress clothes focus down at their phones.

Burly Zach says that he and his boys are going to the pub next door if the (um) pianist wants to join...

The pianist says he will consider the offer, and of course he takes it up because who else does he have to talk to, except for the wind? He hasn’t talked to anyone since the owner called him an inconsiderate waste of space, — you inconsiderate waste of space, the bouncer had said; kick his ass, said the host— and he told Burly Zach, now standing outside in the cold late november, that he was done, finished, quitted completely. Of course he would go get drinks with Burly Zach and his boys. Of course.

The wind plays chopsticks. The pub plays irish ballads. What money he keeps warm in his wallet, all $12 cash, he spends on liquor, and, on the walk home, he slumps over into a tree and falls into a deep slumber. The tree takes him in and the tree grows on.