Subway Diary

I feel pretty discombobulated; I haven’t felt this overworked and undercooked spiritually and creatively in a long time. There’s an inverse relationship between money and writing for me: the more I make, the less I write; writing seems to be an activity best activated by poverty and solitude, and if not outright poverty, workplace misery. I’ve fallen into a terrible position: I have a day job that I like; I work for my self; I’m not miserable…. I’m… successful. I’m becoming successful. There’s a kind of horror to it — to becoming one of those very busy, but generally comfortable people who can afford a couple of glasses of wine each night without blinking. What’s horrific about it is that you can really start starting down the barrel of the rest of your life: suddenly it’s all there — you can begin to duplicate cells in the spreadsheet. But I don’t know to do that obviously; I like the glasses of wine — but I don’t really like how I feel drinking them; I don’t really like becoming, or being, a workaholic. The greatest power is forgoing of power. It is extremely difficult for we modern people to have power and not use it — to have a high hourly rate and not book more hours, to have Internet and not watch porn, to have a phone and not use apps, and so on and so on and so on and so on. There are endless tools that we ought use less, endless opportunities that we ought say no to. There is balance, hypothetically, out there — balance is possible — but only when we begin to say no, survey our limits, mark boundaries. This is not self-help: it’s self-castigation. Our basic cultural disposition is constant growth: we should not celebrate or mystify the process of relearning how and when and why to prune.