The Spinning Ball of Yarn

on being alive

In the past week I’ve had many, many lovely conversations on the phone and I will say that a lot of them have been about place. It’s a thing that has completely filled my mind lately. To be honest it’s taken over my creativity, my cooking, my ability to just be. My roommate said it perfectly the other day, as we all figure out where we’re going next. He said, I could invest so much in this place but I’m scared to. I don’t want to be tied down here. I miss my friends and family.

It’s kind of like falling in love I added, in my own brain. There’s so much potential. How do you decide to let it take you in?

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I picked up a Richard Brautigan book this weekend because I used to read him in college and it reminded me of my college friends. A lot of them still sit on that big body of water in the midwest. The most dazzling thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve explored the west.

I bought a large book stacked with three of his stories. As a poet who is obsessed with sentences and words and rhymes and alliteration, as a poet who desperately wants to write some good fiction at some point in their life, I’ve been looking at authors like Brautigan who smack you in the face with beautiful lines once in five pages. The in between is peculiar, verging on unrealistic, short choppy lines. I’m bad at plot but I haven’t decided I’m doomed yet. I have a lifetime to figure it out—how I want to write.

Some of the chapters make me laugh out loud. I read a few pages to Silas the other day and we discovered, upon our delight, that a main character was born in Meridian, Mississippi. A random detail, but Silas is from Meridian. And then, upon further searching, we discovered that Richard Brautigan was raised in Eugene.

This prompted me to look up other famous people who are from Eugene, since I know that Sufjan Stevens spent summers here and also spent some time in my hometown, attending the same college I did. After a google search I discovered that Matt Kearny also grew up in Eugene, who I never thought I would mention in a newsletter, but I have touched Matt Kearny’s guitar in the basement of the same college that Sufjan Stevens attended. The spinning ball of yarn that we all are!

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I’ve been hit, along with deciding where to go, that I am kind of old. Life doesn’t extend itself like a linear line anymore. From 4 to 7 you learn to read, from 16 to 17 you learn to drive. I turn 24 in a couple of months and what then? Is this why I feel some insatiable desire to never stay in one place for longer than a year? Is this why people get married so young? I’m kind of bored. I could go for a marriage and a new town.

I could go for a dog and a great novel idea and a new hobby such as playing a guitar. But then, as you might know, the creeping notion that you have to be good comes. That’s the problem with college. It gives you the mindset that you have to use whatever skill you have. Fuck that. I just want to clumsily pluck some strings and continue to draw shitty comics.

The great thing about this newsletter is that I never imagined it going anywhere. It was just something to do on the mountain. And I still like it, I don’t have any expectation for it. That gives me a lot of freedom. Other things like this: cooking, sleeping, listening to an album. The great magic in life has no expectation.

I’m going to keep expanding that list and tape it on my wall. A great big list of everything that has no expectation and maybe by the end of my life I’ll find the greatest freedom of all. As my friend Keith (if you listen to Dolly Parton, you’ve heard Keith play the guitar. Great big ball of yarn!) said this weekend, we already won the greatest lottery of life. The chance of being alive—so slim it makes my mind swim in a pond of tar just thinking about it. Thank god there’s no expectation for it. We just get to be. And we’re all alive together at the same time, perhaps an even greater win.

Jo

welcome to life little flower