The drunken debauchery had to end eventually. I am too old for more than a couple of late nights in a row. I spent today trolling two used bookstores in Carroll Gardens and knitting, reading, writing.
Here's an interesting fact: I prefer solitude to write. I can rewrite or add-to something in public, but free writing, brainstorming, the beginnings are all too stifled by crowds. Like the ideas are too raw at first to bear scrutiny. Like I am embarrassed by my expressions, sighs, and stretches of staring into space.
I wanted so badly to move to Brooklyn the spring before last. I told anyone who would listen that it was my plan to sell everything and try to make it here (this was before I understood how little my everything was worth compared to the expense of moving to this town). Once at a reading, the poet John Poch, said to me, after my elevator speech about New York "why would you want to move there? There's so much going on there, you'll never get any writing done. You need to go some place like Lubbock, where it's the only thing you can do." I listen to my friends talk of 80 hour work weeks, an hour each way on the subway, and I think, there really wouldn't have been any time to write. I become the incurable voyeur, instead. Watching, eavesdropping on passing conversations, creating narratives from the people I see. In my mind, I write a sentence about their lives, then forget it by the time the next train car barrels by.
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