just do the thing

Thoughts on writing, the year, swimming, 'It's a Wonderful Life', and just doing things.

Oh, the magic healing properties of the clock switching from 11:59 on the 31^st to midnight on the first. I earnestly believe in it – why shouldn’t I? I always remember the last day of each year because it is especially suffused with the possibilities of radically restructuring my life, and for that reason alone it matters. Isn’t it so stupidly but beautifully human that I think the tick of a timer can somehow fix everything? I love it. I am not above admitting that, in the same way that I am not above admitting that I eat, piss, shit, and occasionally even fuck just like everyone else.

When it comes to New Years, though, I love the continuity of knowing where I was exactly a year ago, which was: here, in Mexico, typing out an end-of-year letter while my stomach was being ruined by food poisoning, living a classic tale of Icarus flying too close to the spicy-food sun. Here I am a year later, typing out another end-of-year letter by the poolside, and my stomach is once again revolting amid salsa-based food poisoning.

On Christmas evening this year my parents hosted a dinner for the family and a couple guests. It was all perfectly good fun: I was stuffed from cookies, pickled from mezcal, and strategically mute during the conversation about American politics. One of the very kind guests asked me how I was liking it here in Mexico, and I said very much so – the food is wonderful, the people’s eyes are warm, and the Mayan ruins everywhere make me feel beautifully small and insignificant. How could a person not like it? She smiled and said well, you’ve probably been swimming in the pool every day too. No, no, I hadn’t touched the pool once. Why not? I’d be in the pool every day, she said, which she followed with a list of the magic-healing properties of dunking your head in cold water in the morning. It was true, I thought. I would like to swim in the pool! It would do me good! Why can’t I do this simple little thing? Why have I wasted four weeks of a vacation where I could have been swimming?

The conversation drifted on and the evening trickled away, but the thought of the pool kept bothering me. It had been there the whole time, why hadn’t I just gone swimming? What was holding me back? The guests left, the family congregated around collective screen-time, and after everyone was asleep I poured myself a rum-and-coke and then another and another and watched It’s a Wonderful Life on the couch alone, crying like I always do with that movie. Maybe if my brother was trapped under ice I’d jump into a frozen lake, like George Bailey did. Maybe I’d jump into the water from the bridge if my literal guardian angel was drowning. But, jeesh, I can’t even wade into a four-foot deep pool on a ninety-degree-Fahrenheit day! If I’m incapable of being halfway spontaneous in a way that’s pleasant towards myself, what other simple decisions am I not making in my life? And then I stumbled from the couch all airy feeling at 3:30am on the 26^th of December, walked through the courtyard past the pool all lit up in the dark, and wished all puddle-like that I was the type of person who could easily decide to just get into the water and swim and float away. So classic, so typical.

The question of swimming or not is not really about the water; it’s about doing or not doing things – things that are pleasant, joyful, and right for us. This newsletter became obsessed with that question this year because I was obsessed personally. I wanted to swim and float in the ways I needed to. In July and August I went through a long phase of trying to teach myself how to float at the Astoria pool in Queens New York, which I mentioned in an August letter inspired by Mark Twain and David Foster Wallace. Floating didn’t quite work – I kept sinking, over and over, but even with all the failure it felt glorious to be in a cool public pool on a hot sticky afternoon, scalding one’s feet on the concrete and mindlessly dressing and undressing next to hundreds of strangers. It wasn’t that I needed to be swimming all the time, but rather that when I was in the pool with my friend J, or swimming my laps alone, I was precisely where I needed to be. I crave that feeling of peaceful serenity and complete contentment; to me it’s the ideal.

Even though swimming and floating pops us as little leitmotifs again and again and again, I am not an aspiring Olympic swimmer. The great productive pleasures of my life are reading, and writing — and even though I’m aware of this simple fact, I’m horrifically adept at self-sabotage and preventing myself from reading and writing. So, what to do when you cannot do the thing you desperately want to do? The letter that tackled this question the most head-on was the one from August, You Can Live the Wrong Life, which was written at what I’ll call the most furious part of my dive into Rachel Cusk and her Outline Trilogy. I had been writing steadily, and reading productively, but everything I had been doing had felt hollow. The June letter about Van Gogh was interested in similar questions, but more broadly about the merit of creating art while suffering, which felt interesting to ponder at a time when it felt like the world was melting¹. But my favorite of these related pieces is my letter from April, written at a time when I hadn’t scribbled out a meaningful word in over two months. In what other letter will you get thoughts on Lent, phone-addiction, John Prine, and a lengthy report on a specific model of a Las Vegas slot machine?²

It's not that I even believe that this struggle with living the right life is the most important topic ever. On the contrary, I want to write about other things! I want to write about love, moral tragedies, beautiful music, slice-of-life things, and possible horizons. But I am completely useless if I am not seriously reading, writing, and living the basic elements of my right life. I said this in the Cusk-inspired letter, but for me the act of picking and laying down words is a vessel that holds me. Without the work, I spill out everywhere, and I end up being a sad little puddle that is a black hole of misery. But I’m tired of quietly despairing and being so flimsy. I want to be solid and sturdy like a tree, as I said in my letter on ancestors and Ohio. But I can’t live my right life without work, and focus, which is the place I reached in my recent letter on Chicago and winter, inspired by Hemingway and Hopper. Sometimes a person must be alone in their solitude, steeling themselves and slowly chipping away at the work. For so many years likeminded people on the Left have railed against work and the hustle-mindset, and yes: down with poor-paying, bullshit jobs. But I love this work; it gives my life shape and meaning. I not only want to work, but I need to work. I want my cup to runneth over with words. I want to create things, and not just be a creature of consumption and directionless criticism. In George Bailey’s words, “I want to live again!” I want to be a person that does things again.

This newsletter has become an exercise in a specific person (me) doing things again (writing), and it has vaguely worked! 16 letters this year (excluding the ‘thank you’ note), and somewhere around 50,000 words. I’m incapable of re-reading my things and enjoying them – all I see are the imperfections³. But still, the best part of the newsletter has been the kind feedback and notes of appreciation from readers, not to mention being able to chat and message back. The second-best part of the newsletter has been how it has impacted my writing. As Clara said recently in her newsletter, it’s been helpful to think of newsletter writing as a kind of practice: a place to build skills, be challenged by the form, and work under the watchful eye of readers. Maybe that last part is the most essential to me. If it’s like Shakespeare says in As You Like It, that “All the world’s a stage”, or that we are all performers contributing our verse, then doesn’t the audience always deserve the best show they can get? Shouldn’t our verse be uniquely beautiful? That is what I try to do here, even if this newsletter is mostly practice, or a dress rehearsal. I hope you have appreciated it — thank you for reading as I occasionally stumble and flub my lines.

But even if it is just practice: who cares? Even if only five or ten people read it, what does it matter? It does not matter, which I think is the key for just doing things. It does not really matter how many readers I have, or that I don’t want to write in the falsely chatty way that is expected of online writing. I can write however I want. What’s going to happen: am I going to be questioned by the newsletter gestapo? Am I going to be thrown into the content-gulag and forced to type-out clickbaity slop? No, it does not matter, and what a relief! I can create my own meaning. No Gods, No Masters! Do the thing, and do it beautifully! That is the takeaway from this year, and something I want to drag into the next. Do the thing. Do it well. Create your own nucleus of joy and drive that cannot be taken away from you.

To that end, take the plunge! Stand on the threshold of the pool like I did a few nights ago. What does it matter if there’s a rainstorm!? Dip your toes in, feel the water run up your leg hairs. Who cares if anyone is watching? Dunk your head and feel the water rush down your face. Someone, quick; call the police on this person who is enjoying the feel of their body while they’re still alive! Lay your arms across the surface, watch how the lights twist and morph in the waves. Oh, no, the audacity of a person attempting to experience a fleeting moment of joy! Stick your legs out, watch the water rush off your swim trunks, slowly kick your feet like the paddles of a Mississippi riverboat. Who cares? I do, that’s good enough. Floating alone in the water, fruit bats flying across the black sky, iguanas scurrying across the rocks, the sounds of heavy breathing and the water rushing in and then receding from the ear canal. Do the thing, today and tomorrow. Live the beautiful life you were meant to.

1. This is unfortunately still an interesting question!! I am SURE i will write about it again!!

2. The book that saved me in February was Halldór Laxness’ Independent People, which is such an incredible book and deserves a lot more than a passing mention. Maybe I’ll write something about it in the future…

3. and the typos!! God oh God, can we dispel with this idea that we don’t need editors!?