the habit of being

I have the headache.

Oh no.

I’ve been having it all day.

Been drinking? Sinus? Hunger?

I had a plastic cup of white wine at the MR users meeting yesterday, but I think it’s sinus.

Do you have any Tylenol or anything?

I have Ibuprofen. Just took some. February is the worst month of the whole year.

Worst for whom?

For me.

Because of the March grant proposal?

No, because of just how I am. I am always sad in February. I have all these years of journals, so I can figure this stuff out. July and August are my happiest months; February is definitely the worst.

Come home and let me make you take a Goody powder and I’ll give you a Red Bull and vodka and you will feel better. I don’t know what mine are, maybe September or November. It was summer when I was young.

Summer was the worst or the best?

The best.

I think it’s just the light.

Got SAD? I used to think about that when you lived in the basement.

Yeah, living in the basement was awful. I never want to do that again. Unless I get a basement in the East Village or something.

There’s a whole different basement vibe there, of course. Granddaddy has had his whole house boxed up for two weeks now.

Did he start calling you again?

Yeah.

Was he mad?

No. He said no, but I’m not sure.

Have you ever read “Goodbye to All That,” an essay by Joan Didion about New York? It is so good. I had never read anything by her about New York before, always about California.

No. Is it in a collection?

It’s from Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I’ll send it to you.

I’m not really cleaning up, am I?

Not exactly.

I had a plan, part of which fell through when the car wouldn’t start - the grocery part. I walked to the bread store. On Saturday, our neighborhood has just as many cute dogs as Georgetown. I saw a Corgi, a Bernese mountain dog, a fox hound, just to mention the highlights.

The essay is so perfect. It starts off when she’s 20 and she just came to New York and she doesn’t know how much to tip people and she gets the bridges wrong and the whole rest of the essay is that good.

I would die before I asked for help from someone I didn’t know how to tip, and I’m not even young. But you are her.

If so, I will no longer be able to stand New York when I am 28, and I will move to Los Angeles.

You can be her and I will be … maybe Collette.

Hey, that’s not fair. How come you get Paris?

Because you get skinny.

Collette was skinny.

Not when she got older. She was very fat.

I’ve only read The Vagabond. She was definitely skinny in that.

Yep, dancer skinny, but later, fat fat fat.

Joan Didion is still skinny. She’s still crazy too though.

Exactly, but crazy in a having-a-good-income way. An essay-writing way. You may have already made me miss the whole cleaning window of opportunity.

Goodbye to All That

Oh, now you have Really done it. This might call for a cigarette. Another rule broken.

. . .

It’s very good. Makes me feel kind of sick.

Her writing is always like that. Her novels are even worse, or better. She writes about being crazy like it’s normal rather than like it’s some clinical specimen.

So, do some people read it like some clinical specimen, or does it make everyone feel sick?

I think some people just don’t understand it enough to feel sick. Like my professor, for instance.

But if you didn’t understand it, would it still be good to read?

Apparently just her descriptions of New York are enough to make it good to read. I don’t think you would have to understand. Her prose is really beautiful regardless.

That’s what I was thinking, looking back at the writing.

But my professor acts like it’s enough just to have beautiful prose. Which isn’t true. I mean, it’s fine that people of all different levels of craziness-understanding can enjoy Joan Didion’s essays, but they never would’ve been published in the first place if she hadn’t known what she was talking about.

Right.

It’s weird though, because with the essays from our class, the prof. is always emphasizing in the workshop “Do you feel like you know what the piece is about? Does it feel complete?” etc.. but with Joan Didion, it’s fine if she doesn’t know what it’s about or if she doesn’t understand why the character leaves New York by the end. It’s like if someone is good enough, you can just accept the worth of their writing without actually getting it.

I know everything there is to know about how it’s “relatively hard to fight at six-thirty or seven in the morning… and it seemed to me a pleasant time of day.” I think we all do it all the time, though. There is plenty of writing that is good to me but doesn’t evoke the feeling that I know exactly what is in this writer’s head. What it’s like to be them.

Yeah.

Like, Ishiguro in the one about the servant [The Remains of the Day]. I love every word, but the character’s feelings don’t affect me, except aesthetically. I feel for him, and I think I understand him, but not like I know the feeling.

I haven’t read that. I almost bought it the other day. I’ve seen the movie.

Lemme go look.. it’s not here, check your box. I read it last right before we moved. You will like it.

I really like sad love stories and books about crazy people and I’ve read a lot of them and liked a lot of them, but it was still something totally different when I started reading Faulkner. Not only were these people crazy, but they were crazy in the same way as people in Statesboro were, people I grew up around. With Joan Didion it was like that - she’s not just crazy, she’s MY kind of crazy.

Exactly. The sick feeling does not lie.

The literary-induced nervous breakdown is the only true measure of a writer’s talent.

Absolutely, a first date question: What work put you in the hospital? And, why?

I can’t decide whether it would be worth it to be crazy to be able to write about it like Joan Didion does.

I got to a point when I had to stop even reading her, because I didn’t want to go there.

Maybe it’s better just not to go there.

You have to be braver than me to go back, when you get past those times.

I don’t think they ever really go away.

No, but you have to do them over to write them, and I have to keep some distance. Maybe if you don’t live with anyone.

Did you write a lot when you were my age?

Not like you. Nothing like. Only sometimes. You know, in notebooks. You are the one. Reading is way easier.

Writing is awful.

Causes crying, drinking, smoking, total unavailability.

It’s this masochistic desire to turn your personal misery into some beautiful work of art, which is totally impossible, only leads to more misery.

Well, I dunno. Look at that essay. She was brave.

She’s really good.

Or, she was crazy again, so she was already there and could write it.

She probably wrote a lot of it down when she was there, and then just held on to it until she understood it.

There’s my advice, write it while it’s happening, or else wait till everyone else is dead and you have nothing left to lose.

Anais Nin wouldn’t let her diaries be published until everyone she wrote about was dead.

I meant it as in everyone would have to be dead before I’d be alone enough to write what I would write if I could write.

Maybe there’s only a certain time-frame to get things written in, before you have to be a real person. But Joan Didion’s married and has at least one child.

That’s why she’s so brave. Maybe if Virginia Woolf had been alone, she could have stayed alive. She had to write, and then go downstairs and be married and have a social life. People around checking to see if she was normal all the time. How could she be?

I don’t even see how you can really be expected to write anything while you’re trying to have a job and pay rent and not cry all the time, let alone when you’re trying to be someone’s mother or wife or daughter or a halfway decent person at all.

Exactly.

But if you don’t do those things, what is there to write about?

You have to be able to do both, that’s the hard part. I guess if you are writing about stuff that doesn’t blow your own mind, you know, like mysteries or something you researched, it can be done.

I’ve never wanted to write about anything like that. I don’t see how people put in all the energy they do just to write about someone else’s writing or someone else’s art. I mean, no matter how great an academic paper is, it won’t ever be as good as the work it’s written about.

Yeah, but it’s the kind you can do and have a life. It’s intellectual, and that’s where the safety is.

I don’t understand how I ever thought my intellectual ambitions could even hold a candle to my artistic ones.

Maybe because you are very smart. It isn’t easy, being like you.

I don’t think being very smart is really worth all that much. I would rather be very kind, or very talented.

Not a kind word to say for very rich?

Being smart is just a way to make up for not being rich. Being kind and being talented have nothing to do with it.

It would just make it easy to live, and I think it would be more fun to be kind with money. I would be very kind to you, for one thing.

I think most really kind people don’t have much money.

‘Cause they can’t keep it long enough to accumulate?

Because they’re more sympathetic maybe. Being sympathetic is really important. Right up there with being a good writer. You’re really kind though, plus you’re kind for good reasons, unlike me.

What?! I think you are way kinder than me.

I’m just selfish. I’m nice to people because I don’t want anyone to get mad at me ever.

Well, I kinda believe that, but more about me than you.

Jennifer thinks she is not as nice as I am, but at least she tells people the truth. If Joe upsets her, she tells him so. If I don’t do the dishes and it annoys her, she tells me so. I never tell anyone anything.

I know, it’s so much nicer than saying nothing and then saying “nothing” over and over when they ask you what’s wrong, like I do. And if someone hurts my feelings, apologizes, and says they didn’t mean to, I will still insist that they were not hurt at all. What’s up with that?

I do that too. I feel like there are only two states… completely accepting unconditional love, and being an awful person.

Right. Betty was one state and I am the other. You are more like her, but not as much of a sap. Remember when you made snacks look pretty on plates?

Yeah, back before I started being a horrible person. I never do things like that now. Betty never stopped making snacks look pretty. I was already ruined by the time I was 13.

No way, you are much better now, but we shouldn’t be talking about you today. Les monthlies will be making you cry.

I’d rather be a crazy artist than a good person. That is where you and Betty are the same and I am different. Besides, I’ve been crying all month. I hate February.

I am not like her. I knew it when I was 12 and read Gone with the Wind, that I was a Scarlett and she was a Melany. But, her kind of goodness is not a good thing when the people around you aren’t kind too.

In books about saints and things, they’re always acting like if you’re kind enough then other people almost can’t help but be kind to you back. It is too bad that is not really true.

Yeah. Other people have to be perceptive or also kind. Like with Betty, I’m not naturally kind, but I could see how kind she was so it made me be kind to her. Oh fuck this fucking kind shit. You know?

No, not really.

Thinking about kindness makes me feel like I’m drowning in mud.

Joan Didion definitely never writes much about kindness.

Kindness makes me feel sick a whole nother way.

Yeah, there’s the sickness of what you think you are, and the sickness of what you think you’re not.