Shenny: Other People's Resolutions

Jan 25

My Fellow Shennyan:

I haven’t written a word of my book-in-progress in over two months. Do I have an excuse for you? Travel, family, semesters starting and ending. It’s an old story.

I’ve spent too long cleaving my sense of self to my creative output to not recognize these feelings flubbing me of late. ‘Flubbing’—like that cousin who’d point at your belly, only to flub your nose with his finger the moment you looked, naturally, at what he was pointing to. A continuous annoyance that makes you feel mad and stupid.

Shenny helps, but a little. The only solution is to push everyone and everything away to sit yourself down and do it. Then do it again as soon as you can.

But that’s not the only solution. There are as many ways to get writing done as there are delusions about the writing life. Here’s another: find others who need to write, and commit to doing it together. Bring everything with you into that room with them. ‘Why do writers learn best in a community?’ is how my workshop syllabus begins this term. It must be that exchange, a mess of other heads to bring you out of your own.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. Kombucha at Happy Hour
I’m not Dry-Januarying, but I need for a number of reasons to get out of my pandemic-induced habit of drinking 1 or 2 cocktails alone every night around 5pm. The way I pour my martinis and Manhattans brings the recommended nightly sum of 2 drinks up to 3 or sometimes 5 measured ‘drinks’ of spirits (1.5 oz/serving, per the experts). Mocktails only impress on me what I’m not getting, so I’ve found gratification in kombucha, poured in a rocks glass over a big hunk of ice, sometimes mixed with club soda. Kombucha has that vinegar tartness that comes close to replicating the burn you get from a sip of the hard stuff, and pouring it into a good glass summons up the joy of having taken a moment to give yourself a gift. That vitalizing tink of ice on crystal occurs no matter what the beverage. Plus: gut health.

2. Bobb Trimble’s Voice
Picture the wavering tremolo of a flute at the bottom of its register. Low flutes always sound like they’re walking a tightrope, and once they get back up to the high notes it’s the sonic equivalent of watching a bird soar in flight. That’s what it’s like listening to Bobb Trimble’s ‘One Mile from Heaven’:

Some months back, Spotify fed me two of Trimble’s tracks from his 1980 release Iron Curtain Innocence. They had that perfect mix of familiar and new. Familiar: What if Kevin Barnes were born 20 years earlier with only analog filters to work with? New: Is this song sampling The Wizard of Oz? There’s more than Trimble’s voice to love about Iron Curtain Innocence (that cover tho? like Pippin Took with Daddy issues), but that thinness—its so willowy, his voice—holds it all together. A masterpiece.

Other People’s Resolutions

The flight to Denver was delayed an hour and a half, leaving us just a 30-minute layover. N & I sat ourselves quickly, just a touch anxious, and for the next 20 minutes passengers with roller bags they had a hard time maneuvering opened closed overhead bins in hopes to find empty space. When they found space, they put their bag in then backtracked to a seat closer to the front, asking folks in the aisle to somehow stand aside.

Nobody knows how to board a plane efficiently. Another old story. I spent the time eyeing the guy in the seat across the aisle: 60s, bald, glasses, tan, large hands and those sneakers that are more hiking boot than sneaker.

I assumed he was flying home. His wife, I presumed, sat on the other side of him. They held hands during takeoff. He paid me no visible attention.

My routine on flights now is, as we start taxiing toward the runway, to stop whatever music or movie that’s playing in my ears and close my eyes and clasp my hands together and pray to Jesus. What I do is I imagine I’m in the old library in the town I grew up in, the Herndon Fortnightly, that you may recall was in a two-room building with old cracked tiles around the fireplaces and a musty smell I’ll never forget. Jesus—a nerd among his peers, a kid who ditched his folks in the big city and spent all his time in the temple just to argue with the older nerds there—sits over by the microfiche machines, and I picture myself walking around the corner and finding him. He stands and says my name. Of course he’s wearing white robes. I say, ‘Hi Jesus,’ and we hug, and we stand there holding each other. Then I ask him, in so many words, to watch over everyone on the plane and get us to our destination safely, and Jesus says, ‘I’ve got you.’ I say, ‘Thank you, Jesus,’ and he says, ‘I’ve got you, I’ve got you,’ until we’re all the way up in the air and I feel less anxious about the possibility of dying.

Twenty minutes into the flight the man across the aisle opened a little leatherbound notebook, the kind brushed and hand-stamped and made lovely to better entice you to journal. He turned to a page that held a list:

Finish “Bible in a year”
Finish “Catechism in 1 year”
Go to church with Joann on Sundays
Read at least 6 books
Buy a new truck or car
Investment transfer to IWM
Ski at least 10 times
Doterra
Be more Christ like

I took out my phone to quickly and surreptitiously get it all down. I missed a line or two of the list, but I’m confident in the rest. It wasn’t until I got home that I learned that ‘DOTERRA’ (he wrote in mostly caps) was actually doTerra, a pyramid scheme involving essential oils, and I wondered what Jesus would do if he were involved. You can’t say he wasn’t a salesman.

On an airplane, there’s the beige and the grey of the seatbacks and walls, the unmoving domes of passengers’ heads, the same attendant walking down the aisle over and over. That’s all you’ve got to look at for three hours, and they don’t like you moving your body much, and so the whole thing is torture for a brain like mine. If you are next to me, or across the aisle, or across and up two seats like a knight’s move in chess, and you open up a phone or new window on your laptop, I’m going to have to look at it.

The only parts of Fifty Shades of Gray I ever read were the pages on the e-reader of the 50something businessman in the seat next to me, one flight during that book’s heyday. I’ve watched hundreds of people type in their phonescreen passwords, noting those who like a pattern or shape and those who must be using some number of significance. I’ve seen the names of iPad owners displayed in big letters at the top of their Settings screen as they try to log onto the WiFi. It’s a shame my memory is so terrible, my fingers far too dumb to pick a pocket. I could really wreak some havoc.

What am I looking for? More data. Things to know, no matter how useless. They’re more pacifying to me than any story. The man across the aisle read a book for most of the plane, one from my angle I couldn’t also read with him. It must count toward his goal of 6.

What charms me about his list is how much it reveals about his values and desires, how banal and special they are, how their inconsistencies reveal a person and not a character I might read about. But today what I’m reminded of is how resolutions see a year ahead as another chance to improve ourselves, our lives, our station. Buy a new truck or car. I myself have one bandying about re updating my personal style, in terms of clothing choices, despite all the writing I do here and elsewhere about the need to live with, among, and in service to others.

What would Jesus do on an airplane? What’s the most sanctified way to be bored? We made our connection. On the last leg of the trip it was too dark to look at anybody. No memory of what I thought about.