the dark night rises

i felt some weird craving to watch the dark knight rises the other evening, which is a weird grimdark bloated movie craving that recurs periodically for me (also for the second and third matrix movies)(i know) and i always eventually need to sate even if though i think in many ways the movies are ridiculous and not good and there are better uses of my time. naturally i fell asleep after like an hour of binging on the hot carbs of the movie (i didn't make it to the part i like best, which is when he has to climb out of the underground prison)

 

the next morning i remembered back to the summer of 2012 (!), my second grad school summer (oh my god those warm empty endless lines of days, this was also the summer when we binged battlestar galactica) when i was using a proto-substack called letter.ly to send out a paid newsletter as i tried to figure out a way to live as a writer and a person and my life was made when this was shouted out in my favorite website the awl's newsletter (i'm thankful i still have a copy of this in the depths of my inbox memory palace, even if all the links and images are broken).

 

the newsletter's name was called "drafts" and that was its gimmick as well, which was that i was always a writer who hated revision and found a daily process and other things provided as MFA program gospel very difficult and so the idea was that every day i would try to write something and regardless of how good or complete or polished it was, i would send it out to subscribers (and if there were multiple discrete drafts, i would send out all of them). the second gimmick (i love gimmicks) was that i would hand- or type- write the things i was writing and attach them to the emails. as with the blog i was doing before the MFA program, i thought the materiality of them would give them more weight, value, even if the words on the paper pages were ephemeral and unpolished.

 

i was trying to write poetry for money that summer because i thought that the problems of my life were primarily related to being a person who wrote fiction (lmao) and did not have money and my life would be better if i was a poet and the end result was i wrote a bunch of bad poems but the bad poem i am fondest of is this one about an argument d and i had about anne hathaway, which puns on the idea that shakespeare was married to an anne hathaway. 

 

when i started the project, i thought of it as a possible future for myself, but instead i found it just injected a lot of anxiety into what would have otherwise been a more peaceful time and i earned (i think) around six hundred dollars over the course of the summer and abandoned it at the end of the summer and after that barely wrote anything for years. i'm thankful, as i go into start a work monday that i don't really want to start, that i ended up getting a stable job where i am paid well to write emails all day and i have some form of a healthy dailyish writing practice (this) and i do not have any problems related to being a fiction writer. i'm thankful for the chance to recognize this.

(draft 1-2, draft 3-6, final)