Often I get on the subway and I don’t know what to try write — I feel like I’m wasting my caffeine high; the relative clarity of early mornings.

At the moment, the melody from the Mozart quartet I was listening to while getting ready this morning is still etching and re-etching itself into my brain; I suppose I’ve listened to the quartet enough times now that I don’t even particularly need the recording. I’m a very auditory learner in a primarily visual culture. (Though I suppose everyone listens to podcasts now, which are obviously a form of auditory learning; I don’t like podcasts).

The attempt to write — to write even from this blank, half-dazed, very-Friday, end-of-the-week, state of mind — is really the attempt to transcend the state from which I’m writing; to write my way into fullness.

Someone asked me the other day what I would do if I wasn’t a writer — at least part of the time — and I was astounded by my answer: probably nothing; probably be dead. It was dire and dramatic, but I said it matter-of-factly: because it is matter-of-fact. I have no life, no real life, no meaningful life, beyond what is proscribed by the modicum of my talent.

My subway diary — really a tiny portion of what I write on a daily basis — is a philosophical warm-up for the rest of my writing day (which I usually perform secretly while at work); a re-thinking, a re-working, of the grounds — the reasons — I have for writing in the first place. This process metaphysicalizes my writerly identity.