territory
Over the weekend I did one last canvassing shift. As it happened I had been assigned almost the exact same route a few months prior, but it would have been familiar anyway: it had me walking up Hoover to where Hyperion splits with Sanborn, a route I used to drive daily to and from my first Silver Lake apartment. The streets there are narrow and twisty, and the girl I was walking with was impressed by my facility with them. "This is my old neighborhood," I explained. We were blocks from T and S's old apartments, from the coffee shop where I read my first galley of my first book. So much of the canvassing I did before this race had pulled me out of LA, up to the Antelope Valley or down to Orange County, and I always felt like an interloper. Here I felt like I belonged-- like I had made myself belong. I'd ground my boots into this pavement for a million reasons in the months and years prior. Here was just one more.
Then I flew to New York for a work thing. (More on that... next year, probably.) I barely saw the city at all: I was in my hotel room, in a studio, and then in my hotel room again, collapsing into a nap. When I woke up it was late afternoon, and I would be leaving again in the morning, so I forced myself to get up and take a walk. I had bought some sweaters in LA that, because this is the age we live in, I could return in Manhattan; I put them in my bag and walked down Broadway towards Union Square. When my errand was accomplished I walked further south to The Strand, where I listened to a bunch of teenagers discuss whether or not it was, like, worthwhile to read Joan Didion. I touched many books and didn't buy any of them. I felt tuned into a ritual from another lifetime, which is what my late teens and early twenties were, right?
I lived in New York a bunch of times, but only ever for short periods: summers in college, really. I was there almost every weekend when I was working in New Haven, I guess. But this was a part of the city I learned early. The first of those summers I lived in a New School dorm in the Financial District and interned at a publishing company headquartered in the Flatiron. I would take the train to Union Square and walk the rest of the way, listening to something on my iPod (!), uncertain what I wanted to do but certain that this-- what I was doing-- was not it.
Back in the present, I walked up Broadway in the gathering dark. It was the day after the midterms, and the Empire State Building was lit up red, white and blue; everything else was transitioning to holiday decorations. I listened to Taylor Swift, naturally, the new album, her voice an old touchstone. I knew how to think through what 18 year old me would think of me at 35: fat but happy, basically. Thrilled about the writing, wary about everything else, but what wasn't she wary about? And anyway, what did she know. I appreciate her, but I do not need her opinions on everything anymore.
At some point that exercise began to seem useless. Who cares what I thought, what I think. The air was crisp with chill, and I was listening to a song I liked. I knew where I was in space, in time, and I knew which blocks to turn down to get me where I needed to go next.
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Last call for Editing WTF! Join me, Amy Spalding and Aminah Mae Safi tomorrow to talk about the less sexy but, imho, most important part of the writing process: turning the instinct and guesswork of a first draft into the architecture of a publishable story.