Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

Earlier today, after I’m guessing between 500 and 1,000 hours of gameplay (I’m neither joking nor exaggerating), I finally won my first game of Game.

I have mentioned Game here a few times, but never really spoken in any detail about it. But one of the first zero drafts I wrote in the days immediately following the winter solstice of 2014, when I came back to writing after my grief- and hardship-induced hiatus, was about my impressions of Game back then. I’d been playing for a few months at that point and was genuinely obsessed. It’s now a bit more than three years later, and that obsession has barely abated. I think it’s time to resurrect that zero draft and turn it into a piece.

And how did this win feel, after all these years of effort? Honestly, I felt a genuine and deep-seated sense of accomplishment, the feeling of having set a goal and then investing the time to see it through. This is, admittedly, a ridiculous feeling to attach to a computer game, but there it is.

Victory, baby! Sweet, sweet victory!

Regarding what I said on Monday, that the connection between barba and barber hit me with body-shaking force:

I was totally not joking. Earlier that day, I’d been saying to myself that I would gladly pay a qualified professional for some help with beard care. I haven’t yet figured out how to do it to my own satisfaction, and every day or two I find myself with clippers or scissors in my hand, staring at shape or a number of stray hairs, feeling a bit perplexed about the best course of action. That it’s so constant annoys me a little, and I don’t feel like I’m good at it, and my beard and mustache never quite look as neat as I’d like them to, and whatever combinations of words I’ve used as search terms has turned up endless pages–in modern America, information regarding facial hair care being nothing if not abundant–but not the hard, practical, specific information I’m looking for. Yes, I say, impatiently, but what if your mustache is bristly? I’ve learned about beard brushes (legitimately useful) and beard oil (necessary) and beard balm (jury’s still out) and mustache wax (see bit above about bristly mustaches), but the particulars of wielding the trimming blades with a warrior’s grace are either few and far between, or else so abstruse that they don’t show up on the front page of Google’s rankings, in which case (as we all know) they essentially don’t exist.

Perhaps there are whole sections of the Dark Web devoted to these dark arts, I considered. Perhaps covens of scissor-wielding wizards travel amongst the shadows. They speak in shiver-inducing whispers, the hoods of their cloaks raised, and show up unannounced at our doors. Their knock is a secret knock, but one which everyone knows. A knock that contains within it a mystery, waiting to be solved. Shave and a haircut? it queries, and waits knowingly. When the proper reply comes–Two bits!–nothing further need be spoken. They just know.

So anyway. When it hit me that I was wishing into existence a thing that’s existed literally since the Middle Ages, I was flabbergasted and amused that I’d never made the connection before. I mean, I’ve known the Spanish word for beard for the majority of my life. Did it really never occur to me before right now that there is a connection between these words, that they share the same root?

Nope. Never occurred to me.

I think the last time I went to an actual barber was 1996. How many of them even exist anymore? Have they not all been done away with by stylists and salons?

I have so many questions. Do true barbers see cutting hair as merely an adjunct to what they consider their true callings? Have they just been waiting, patiently, while the spinning helices of their barber poles explain to all eyes capable of seeing that time both passes but is also an endless flow? Do the endless spirals encode an invitation to a cleaner and better world?

Will I walk in, stumble over my words as I try to describe the convoluted path to linguistic realization that brought me to their shop? Will I struggle as I try to express the layers of confusion and stress that have built up as I’ve tried to navigate this chaotic, unknown, bristly world, this perplexing and stressful topography that grew up concomitant with the whiskers on my face?

Will I be met with a strong and empathic gaze and a comforting arm around my shoulder? Will a calming voice reassure: “I know, son. We understand. We’ve been waiting for you.”

I’ve long enjoyed structures like this, of some kind of enforced minimalism, in part because it’s the opposite of my natural tendencies toward let’s call it expansiveness (I count among my favorite writers Neal Stephenson and David Foster Wallace, neither of whom you’d exactly call terse), but also because there are flavors of expression that open up when you do so, ways in which the rhythm of a sentence might meander and flow along pathways that differ from what would be regarded as normal or typically desirable, and when you seek the maximum expansion within the constraint–that is to say, when you really embrace the constraint–then you discover within and through those erstwhile limitations some really delightful potential for fun, which might for example express itself as a sentence which is grammatically correct, clear in its meaning, and also goes on for a ridiculously long time.

#280Tuesday is pronounced “Two-eighty Tuesday.” Is this obvious? Other sound-possibilities those symbols encode–“Two-hundred eighty Tuesday” or, God forbid, “Two-eight-zero Tuesday”–are clearly aesthetically inferior. But wait. Are aesthetic judgments ever truly obvious?

A person whose expertise is the caring of men’s beards (Latin: barba) is called a barber.

A funny outcome of the way I’ve drafted and published since I started the Free Refills project three years ago is that I often can’t remember what I drafted to completion, what I drafted but never saw to the end, and bits that exist only as ideas. And I can never remember what ideas got published and what didn’t.

That I furthermore have tended to zero-draft in a space of immediacy has tended to mean that important themes from my zero drafts get forgotten when I move on to other things. It’s actually kind of funny.

Like for this piece right here, I find myself thinking, “Did I actually publish that thing about how my patterns are those of a sad person, or did I draft that idea but decide for some reason that I didn’t want to publish it, or did I only think about drafting it but then forget about it?”

I did a little searching while I was drafting and I found two pieces that relate to this question. This one is essentially the first paragraph of this piece. This one tells me that I started drafting, but never saw the concept all the way through.

It’s funny to be almost three years into this project and realize that there are huge amounts of low-hanging fruit still available to me to improve my process, the goals and procedures, ways that I might focus my concentration to do more substantive work, and ways (like what I played with this week) to hang on to the publishing practice while having vastly more fun, more play, and more time, offering more pleasure for readers (I imagine), and a far better understanding of how to make my writing actually support my career goals.

This whole thing about struggle and play remains fascinating to me. That for all my talk about ease and the way we can overcome our patterned need to struggle, I have chosen, again and again, to continue to struggle with my writing. I’d like to think that I’m capable of doing better than that, that I’m capable of choosing joy– surely I have the writer’s chops to pull it off–but instead it is easier to just do what I’ve always done, which is to find some way that writing can be a struggle. (For me, because I’m deep enough into zero-draft technique, it’s rarely the initial drafting, but it certainly exists in revisions and, especially, publishing–just scroll back from here to see how many pieces this year have been about the challenges I’m finding with my publishing practice.)

What it amounts to–and to fully explore this will take probably multiple chapters in the first or second book I’m writing with Jerry–is that for some reason, I am subconsciously choosing to create this drama in my life. The most obvious reason, of course, is that by continuing to do what I’ve always done, I can keep myself from moving forward.

I mean, if you really think about it, when you decide to break out of a self-limiting pattern, you are in essence deciding to kill off part of your ego that, irrespective of its flaws, has helped keep you alive to this point. And when faced with change into a new way of being, we don’t have any experience to go on. The old way has kept us alive, the proof being that we are alive. The new way may not work out that way. Thus the essential fear of change hinges on, “If I do this, I might die.”

But I’m really pretty sure that having fun with my writing will not be fatal.

When you really think about it, there really isn’t any reason why the promise to publish daily has been so fraught, so anguished, so full of struggle, when really there are simply a million ways to take that same practice and make it fun.

#OneSentenceWednesday

“Okay, but seriously, Benjamin,” said the voice in my head. “Is there really any reason you’re making this so goddamn hard?“

And thus #280Tuesday was born.

I have to conclude that the practice of daily publishing is no longer serving me. Publishing a daily piece of any real substance takes most of my writing energy, leaving little available for more substantive work. Always having a next piece to publish, always having a next deadline has kept my zero drafts very in-the-moment. It’s good to know that I can always hammer out something on whatever is on my mind, but I’ve used the immediacy of the process to train myself away from the deeper concentration required to write a book.

Somewhat irritatingly, I still can’t shake the feeling that there’s a real value in putting something up every day as an every-day assertion that I am constantly working.

It’s about a month until the spring equinox. It’s my intention to have a solution figured out by then so I can announce new rules for the start of the fourth year of Free Refills.

This week’s writing was an interesting experiment but doesn’t feel at the moment like a particularly successful one. I hoped that writing about the message that is so at the heart of my guiding beliefs would help me develop a sense of momentum toward doing the work that matters most to me.

It hasn’t worked out that way. It feels right now that there was no real drive, no impulse in what I had to say. Every word was true, but it inspired nothing.

Perhaps it will feel differently as the writing has a bit more time to settle. We’ll see.