Friday, January 16, 2026, 12:59 PM
One more week until I go back to work. The last days I worked were the 26th and 27th of December. What a dream. To have a break from that place. My gosh the holiday seasons were brutal and the pay wasn’t worth it. I bought this book about Kerouac last night. The guy at the bookstore suggested it. It’s alright. You can’t really critique an auto-fiction writer in the same way you can a purely fictional writer. You are critiquing nature when you do so. Is it a tree or a blade of grass? Is his ability to comprehend, distill, tell, live adventurously strong? Is his memory, his capacity enormous? And how much time was needed after any of his adventures to tell justly what he had experienced? I am sitting by the window smoking a cigarette. A cold air blows in and some Polish workers talk amongst one another below. What is interesting to me, worth observing, is how long after the said experience is needed to pass in order to write of it. The sooner the better. Too soon though you get unnecessary details. Ginsberg was all poet at a young age. Me? I was smoking pot and listening to shit music, hiding out from the unintelligent world unintelligently. I wish to write something great. I have wished this for so long. I look over the last great attempt but I have no inspiration to pick it back up. The great LA adventure fades into obscurity. Replacing it is the present. And the present is the life beside Fia. Last night she bought tulips. Said it’s early for tulips but a sign of spring. Spoke of their rubbery nature. Like green onions. She has decorated the apartment in them. They are a gift I give to myself. I know they will only last a short period of time but every time I look at them they make me happy. I love this woman. I love what she says and the way she smiles. She is often animated and happy and excited. It fills my life, this world, with a wonderful lightness and joy. Unable to locate a story, I think I’ll head to the bookshop.
3:17 PM
Stayed in. Made winter soup. Butternut squash. First heat the pot with some oil then throw in carrots, onions and spices and sauté, then throw in cubed squash, then a beef broth cube and water and clove and peppercorn and some leftover jellied fat from the pork, then simmer for about forty five. Instead of using the emulsifier I used a masher. The smoothness produced by the emulsifier is nice sometimes but I wanted this one to have some bite. I forgot to mention the wild garlic. I added it in the middle of the whole process with a little water. It flavoured the onions and carrots. Also I took out the cloves before mashing. Anyhow I also boiled some eggs. Then took a bowl and cut the eggs and ladled in the soup then poured some cream overtop and cracked some fresh pepper and toasted some bread, smothered it in butter, then sat to a nice hot soup on this cold winter day. It brought heat to my mouth and legs. Now I am here writing about the soup I made. Because I cannot write about the lives I have lived. I sit in various chairs or walk around pensively considering why it is that I am unable to write. I blame it on the winter, blame it on the city, blame it on the unliterary world of the image tsunami that has affected my brain. Sure I can mention or draw attention to these moments, awareness of the writer’s plight that is now mine, but I cannot write the things. I want to write the things. I want to be a recognized writer. Why won’t I, or why doesn’t it come out of me? I was thinking with head bowed and eyes closed, or better said I had a conversation with myself in this way between two parts of myself, both calm and attempting to help me. One said, “You can’t do this. It just won’t ever happen. It is not in your capabilities to write out scenes of your life that would come together to make a set of great novels.” And the other part of me said, “Ok, but I’m still gonna try.” Why? Why am I still gonna try when part of me knows that if it hasn’t happened now it won’t ever happen? Because it’s the highest calling to me. To distill the experience in intelligent language, in poetic verse, to be chosen for that, there is nothing greater. Do I want homes and vehicles and plane tickets? Yes. But more so I want to express myself. I want to feel the grounded euphoria that comes from being chosen by clarity to speak on its behalf in a moment of exaltation. That is all any of this is, a praise and worship to the life force itself. To be allowed to say, “Well this is what happened, what is happening, what I think about, consider, do, this is what I love and whom I love and this is my friend and these are the adventures we’ve had and I am unique and chosen and I have not been brought here or left here for nothing.” I breathe the same air all the others breathed. And I long to accomplish literary feats the same as they did. Only I am not them. They are not living now. And I wonder if I am supposed to try some other form of telling tales but the thing doesn’t come to me like that. In my deep heart I don’t really want to add something more to the world of the moving image screen. Well, now I am warm from the soup at least. And now I am able to say things a little better having had some food in my belly and some heat in my legs.