The Time Of Year When Things Slow Down And You Gaze Longingly Into The Fireplace 🔥🪵

Plus, I published my essay collection, Late Bloomer!

First Things First…

Late Bloomer is ready for you to order!

This has been such a huge and surreal process for all three of us at Write Away. It’s unbelievable that we made it this far. We sold out our two live essay readings at Pete’s Candy Store and TALEA Beer Co., and we’ve already sold several copies of our collections.

_writeaway_

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Speaking of which, fill out this form if you want our essay collections! We’re working to have our collections delivered to anyone who wants it. We’re selling fast, so get on the list ASAP!

Oh, and also, my next post in two weeks will be answers to the Q&A that y’all submitted throughout the past few months. Here’s a link to submit a question to me! It can be serious! Ridiculous! Silly! Personal! Vulnerable! Doesn’t matter! I’ll answer as many as I can by December 6.

And Dec 6 will be my last post of 2021. 😢 I’m taking the rest of December off to relax during the holidays and eat my parents’ food. I’m sure you’ll understand.

Second Things Second…

As our live readings have ended and our writing projects wind to a close (in favor of the publishing/selling process, at least), I feel at ease. My life’s different. Yes, there’s the box of essay collections sitting on the floor of my apartment, for one. And yes, I did move into a new apartment this month. I assembled some new furniture. I’ve been interviewing with companies and investigating graduate programs. Now, I’m back in suburban Michigan for the first time since my family moved to California seven years ago, visiting friends and memories. The air here is different. Crisp and quiet. You can see the foggy sky between the spindly trees. Drivers don’t speed. They don’t need to. There’s no rush.

We’re coming to the end of the best year of my life. I worked at a startup, published an essay collection, met my beloved fiction writing group in Philadelphia, made a home out of Brooklyn, had several good friends visit me in the city, met a cute girl at a party, found a great therapist, and discovered an optimism for life that I’ve never felt before. Now, I’m back in my hometown, staying in my friends’ homes, with their finished basements and family movie nights. It’s quiet here. Quiet enough where I can feel the creases of my brain expanding to match my surroundings, so open and spacey that all I can hear is air whistling between brick houses. I don’t feel like there’s anything I must do. I just feel relaxed. Without the endless distractions that New York City offers, I’ve made some important realizations.

1. I need at least one good, meaningful conversation every day. I need to talk to a friend about something meaningful. I need to exchange opinions or ideas with no agenda. No jargon, no distractions; just me and someone I know telling each other where we’re at in life. My first day here in Michigan, Aparna and I had one such conversation. It was more intellectual. We talked about how we feel there are (not to be reductive, but) two ways that a writer can wield language: lyrically and precisely. The former is when language describes an object in an expressive, emotional way, sprawling, orchestral, and aesthetic like most poetry, whereas the latter is when language expresses an idea economically, using the most specific terms available to communicate a point. This conversation took place in her car as we rolled through downtown Oak Park. Then, the day after that, I talked to my friend Rohit about next steps in our lives, e.g. moving in with his girlfriend and for me, looking into grad school, which was decidedly not intellectual but still ultimately meaningful.
   

2. I like silence and stillness a lot. I almost forgot how much I love when everyone shuts the f**k up. Everything in New York is always moving. Traffic, people, construction, subways, digital marquees. Buildings are shoved close together and each store sign tries to scream louder than the next. People in Manhattan hold signs in the streets that say “I LOVE JESUS” or “WANT TO SEE YOUR FUTURE? TAROT READING” or “FISH TACOS, $3 EACH.” Walking in the city is a sport, somewhere between speedwalking in the mall and parkour. With all this activity, it can be hard to zone out and listen to yourself; something in your purview will always catch your eye.
   
   Rarely do I see somebody just sitting and relaxing. There are no porches. There’s no one wrapped in quilts and nylon jackets sitting outside on a cheap old rocking chair. Buildings are tall and confine you. The air is always enclosed on at least three sides. We’re like soggy cornflakes in a cereal bowl, endlessly moving around within our fluid trap, rarely given the chance to escape and dry out. I enjoy the city’s chaos to some extent, but it’s hard to recognize how much it seeps into you, crunches your own brain into a dense, dissonant orchestra in its own likeness, until you change your scenery.
   
   I’ve always liked silence. I don’t like listening to music when I shower. Loud sounds bother me. There was this time when I was a kid where my kindergarten teacher played an audio version of a story book, and near the end of this story, in which several animals played their musical instruments clumsily, a goat fell on a drum and triggered a thunderous THUD that would haunt me for weeks. I stopped going upstairs or to the basement alone. I’d been thoroughly spooked. On the other hand, though, I need a fan on when I go to sleep, no matter how cold it is, just for the white noise, so I’m not sure what to make of this contrast.
   

3. I love screaming. Don’t worry about me. Let me explain. Have you ever been to a concert or some other event and, on cue, screamed at the top of your lungs? Try it. I went to a Pistons vs. Warriors game this Friday, where the Pistons could’ve won but blew it. Aside from the surprising moments of passion I felt for my long-neglected city of Detroit, the announcer would occasionally select certain sections and demand that we scream as loud as we could in support of our team. Children and married couples alike appeared on the Jumbotron with contorted faces and hands around lips. They looked incredibly stupid. But also really happy and free. So, following their lead, I did the same.

   Make sure you scream from the diaphragm so the air rattles around in your lungs a bit before it makes its way up. It’s cathartic and primal. It feels like breathing fire; without it, my insides would burn. We so rarely get chances to just scream away our energy—dancing usually helps, as does singing, but there’s something a little too smooth about those forms of expression. It might worry you that this is a necessity for some, but I’d caution against judgment here. We’re all just finding ways to express ourselves and our own angular energy. (I think I now understand punk rock.)
   

4. I will never be an Influencer. I did have the thought, as we all do (I assume), of what it might be like if I had thousands of people following my life. But I think it’s time for me to accept that’s not going to happen for me. I’m never going to have huge swaths of people learning lessons from doctored video footage of my day-to-day life. And, referencing #2, that’s probably for the best. Yes, I’ll convey the same information through this newsletter and the occasional Instagram story, but I don’t think I’ll be successful. Not like Mike Thurston, the giant medium-rare-cooked ogreman whose YouTube channel shows him partying at his villa in Dubai with tan babes and smearing oil on himself at the gym with buff Slavic dudes. (My friend showed me this video during down time at his house. I did not volunteer to watch this content.)
   

5. You can’t force yourself to be anything. I don’t want to intellectualize this one because it feels the most important. I’ll keep it brief. We all have certain qualities that we aspire towards. We want to boost our courage, intelligence, intuition, confidence, etc., like player stats in an RPG game. The problem comes when I identify so hard with the qualities I want to be that I forget about the qualities that I actually am, unflattering as they might be. This year, I’ve spent more time honestly observing how I am in certain situations and documenting it, whether in my journal or memory, like a field reporter studying myself for a story, because if I don’t acknowledge and accept who I am right now, what adjectives contain me, then I’ll never be able to become who I want to be. (If that’s too cheesy for you, here’s a soulless SNL satire to cleanse your brain of my earnestness.)

There are likely more realizations I can excavate if I apply myself, but I think that’s good for now. Maybe what’s more pressing is the knowledge that, as winter approaches and literal darkness will soon ensue, my priorities shift. As our days become shorter and the outside colder, life feels a little smaller. Easier to manage, even. The set of activities we can comfortably participate in shrinks. Life in the winter feels like a tunnel to push through rather than an open expanse to explore as summer often does. Something about that often feels limited, especially early on, but as the cold sets in and we get used to it, I hope to find myself calmed by the slower pace of life.

Other Things of Note

This fantastic album by artist extremely bad man:

The movie The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which wasn’t as unsettling or creepy as I’d expected, but was still pretty good, if mostly for the hilariously transactional/literal style of dialogue.