Let's Make America Sick Again

I was thinking this morning about myself and what a bad idea it is for me to have a self, when I came up with an all new problem to identify in the way I exist.

The problem is that I’m not the person I probably should be. Meaning, I’m a dad who lives in the suburbs, but my thoughts aren’t the thoughts of a suburban dad.

Based on where and how I live, people expect certain things to go on in my mind. But they aren’t the things that are really going on in my mind.

It’s a problem. I don’t feel like the person that I am.

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When I was in Virginia, I was thinking some of the time about why it’s hazardous sometimes to describe a fledgling idea you’ve had, for something you might write or otherwise create. You hear writers talk about this all the time, how you’ve got to guard your ideas that haven’t yet been put in motion.

The resulting advice goes: if you have had an idea, but haven’t started working with it in a writerly way, then keep your mouth shut about it, lest you kill the thing without meaning to.

As soon as you’ve explained your idea to someone, they say, you’ve given it away. You’ve handed it off to the world, and the world has dropped it.

The world will always drop a good idea. You needed instead to warm it, feed it, let it grow before anyone else found out about it. But you didn’t, and now it’s broken. Great job, idiot.

When people talk about this kind of thing, which I think is real, they can sound superstitious.

I think there might be an element of superstition to it.

But I think a big part of why this is a problem, this communicating ideas before they’re ready, has to do with all that is implied by an idea, the stuff that’s attached to it that cannot be explained because it’s nebulous but essential to the idea. An idea that has not been realized as a deliberately created thing is something that’s in constant motion, that’s in perpetual flux, as it simmers in back of your mind. The heat that pours into it causes its molecules to stir, violently, and here you are, across the table from somebody who is only halfway paying attention to this thing you’re telling them about, attempting to freeze that idea, to arrest its constant motion, and peel something off of it that you can show them, to gauge their enthusiasm.

Whoever you’re talking to will never be as enthusiastic as you need them to be. And that’s in part because they’re catching a glimpse of one obscure corner of something grand that’s still in constant flux, which you yourself don’t yet know how to measure or fully comprehend.

So don’t do that.

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I’ve been reading a book called White Wedding by Kathleen J. Woods, published by Fiction Collective 2 at the University of Alabama Press. It’s a short novel about a woman who crashes a wedding and, so far at least (I’m 2/3 of the way in), goes about dismantling everyone there.

This is what the book looks like.

I found out about it because at AWP, the big writing conference, I told someone at the FC2 table, at the book fair, that I’d put together a highly sexual short story collection, and they were like, You should read this book.

White Wedding is highly sexual, in a way that makes me conscious of how nothing I’ve written is really all that sexual. My approach to writing about sex is to make fun of people who want to have sex, not to depict anyone really doing it. I tell people I’ve written about sex, but really I’ve written about desire, and how ridiculous it makes people look.

White Wedding is sexual in ways nothing I write ever will be. And I say that not out of disgust or disdain; rather, I admire the apparent confidence with which this author drives headlong into the erotic. It’s really something.

She uses the c-word a lot. She uses it in the first paragraph.

Kathleen J. Woods dives headfirst into a pool I have barely put my toes in. She shows us how it’s done, and I appreciate that.

If you see Kathleen J. Woods, tell her I said thanks.