Thirty blocks down Geary, short ones. Sushi, churches, nail salons, guy arguing with the police in an Irish accent. Forced myself to keep unmasked, an experiment: nothing happened.
They were playing Pink Flag at the wine bar. I told the server I hadn’t heard it in a while, and he asked me what I was reading. I handed over The Story of the Stone, volume three, and explained the deal. He said he’d check it out.
After Pink Flag it was London Calling. Going for an era there, aren’t we. That's how it was, freer and lonelier. I hadn’t wanted to go on that way.
Green Apple Books with a glass of rosso in me. J. had said, you're a woman writer now, you should think through what that’s going to mean to you. Eyes on the shelves. Hello Adrienne Rich, hello Annie Ernaux, Maggie Nelson. “You’re a woman writer” says something that is trivially true, and then things that are less trivial. It’s occult why anyone would turn away from the common world to spend years building word castles—you never get a good look at the engine behind it—but in my case it had something to do with an incongruity between the common world and the felt world, and now that the relation between those worlds is changing (and on course to change further) the working of the engine is changing also. More than that I don’t know. I haven’t gone this long without writing since—well, not ever.
