hiiiiiii, it’s true… i’m double dipping.

i’m actually posting regularly over there, and it has to do with the fact that i broadened my subject matter beyond my handmade book project/writing about writing.

that said, can’t let a good domain go to waste. i might repurpose this one to something else (i have some ideas but not the time. the eternal conundrum).

buttttt if you’re interested in (humorous-ish) essays, comics and random experiments, pls subscribe to farts and letters.

she’s a cutie. thank youuuuu.

💨 💌 take me to farts&letters pls

Good writing is true. 

It gets past the lies people tell to make themselves and others feel better. 

It’s not you it’s me (It’s definitely you). 

After much time here, I’ve decided to pursue other opportunities (like looking for a job). 

I wish I could (no you don’t) but I can’t make it (yes you can). 

The socially acceptable response is to just go along with it.

You know you’re lying.

We know you’re lying.

But to point out the ruse would be the ultimate asshole move. After all, why ruin the peaceful, albeit fake AF, vibes we’ve got going around here? Perish the thought we engage in some confrontation that makes us a tiny bit uncomfortable. 

Which is what makes the asshole the asshole. The asshole will call you out no matter who’s present (rude). 

Writers do the exact same thing.

Except much later.

While the asshole will call you out in the moment, the writer will object (to themselves) but not say anything so as not to interfere with the natural sequence of events. They’ll then file it all away so they can bring it up later as a thinly veiled “fictional” character and immortalize it in written form so it can be passed down forever and ever, never to be forgotten by anyone, least of all you. 

What I’m saying is, I’m sorry. 

(No I’m not.)

Subscribe now

Hiiiii. This is vol. 1 of many in an ongoing nonfiction series called On being a writer with a day job. Next installment’s coming soonish so pls come hang again.

Paris. November 2018. 

For 9 days I’d been having the quintessential writer experience—that is, sitting in bistros and cafes for hours, reading books and writing in my journal like an asshole. And on this particular day, I was at the mecca of writer assholes: Shakespeare & Company. 

In case you’re not familiar, it’s the bookstore all aspiring or current wielders of words go to be among books you can get at most bookstores in the U.S. and on Amazon. Except these books come with the coveted Shakespeare & Co. stamp as well as the experience of being in the same rooms as not-for-sale books that might have been sniffed by luminaries like Hemingway, James Baldwin and Anais Nin. I will even go so far as to say that you have not experienced Paris if you haven’t gone to Shakespeare & Co. to breathe in their nose particles. 

Subscribe now

Another benefit of going there in person is that on the second floor you get to sit at the little desk with the typewriter by the world-famous reading room with the world-famous French windows overlooking the world-famous Notre Dame. Which is what I was doing that cool fall afternoon. It was there that a fellow crone was holding court in front of a small group of nose-particle sniffers. I imagined her a former Beatnick type, maybe a bestie of Ginsberg or somesuch who, with her incredibly comfortable house clothes and wild hair, definitely belonged to an era when people didn’t have to worry about having their pic or vid shared with the masses after having rolled out of bed without wasting time primping when there were books to be read. To her credit, she was still living in that era: pics and vids were prohibited inside the bookstore. 

In any case, this crone was griping about the music from the street musicians below. They were ruining poetry hour. “I’m gonna go tell them to be quiet,” she said and walked out in a huff. It was at this time that a fellow nose-particle sniffer and tourist from Asia took it upon himself to start pouring everyone the tea the crone had prepared for her guests. It’s important to note he was from Asia, by the way, because I imagine in Asian cultures, when there’s freshly brewed tea sitting in front of you, it’s perfectly fine, nay, mandatory, to pour it for everyone before it gets cold. But, unfortunately for this good samaritan, not so in crone culture. In crone culture, it was an affront to she who had brewed it. And when she who had brewed it returned, having successfully told the street musicians to pipe down, she hissed at the sight of freshly poured tea in people’s mismatched cups. “Who did this?!” she said. The rogue tea pourer sheepishly raised his hand.

It was in that moment, as I watched the crone snap at the well-meaning tea guy in one breath while exhalting poets in another, that I decided this was the life I wanted. I didn’t dare be so bold as to yearn to be the crone yelling at writer types about tea in a beloved world-famous bookstore overlooking the world-famous Notre Dame. But I did yearn to devote my life to writing with even more gusto than I previously had. 

I decided that instead of holding down writing jobs that took up precious energy and time and brain space writing for other people instead of for myself, I was going back home to New York to cobble together a few service and part-time jobs so I could dedicate the rest of my days to the arts.

This dream shot through my body like a bolt of lightning. The nose particles had worked their magic. I was going to be a writer with a capital W. 

And so I went back to New York City, ready to take on a life of bohemia. 

A few months later, I was at a desk again. 

But in an office. 

I had just gotten a full-time job. 

I’ve wanted to write a book since I could remember.

When I was 8, I decided I’d be the youngest published author ever.

When that didn’t happen, I vowed to be an early 20something prodigy first-time novelist.

When that didn’t happen either, guess what did happen?

Nothing. Because I forgot about it. Life kind of just rolled on.

Looking back, I now know I didn’t particularly want to write books because I had stories burning inside me, dying to be written in book form. Whether it was fame, prestige, or VIP access to the secret wings of bookstores and libraries, my superficial motivations couldn’t overcome the actual drudgery of writing books.

It turned out I liked the idea of writing them more than I actually wanted to write them.

Which, by the way, is never a good reason to write a book—or do anything, really. But ESPECIALLY books. All that work and time and misery for very little payoff.

Literally. Books don’t pay.

Recently I caught up with a grad school professor who told me about his short-lived afterwork gig doing standup in coffee shops in 1960s New York. I asked him why he never pursued it beyond that.

“I just didn’t feel called to it,” he said.

And that sums up everything pretty well. Life, that is.

And books.

*

There’s a lot of things we don’t feel called to do that we have to do.

Pay rent.

Wash dishes.

Take out the trash.

Shave our pits.

The fact that all these things take up so much of our time makes it that much more important to spend the time we actually have on the things we do feel called to do.

For me, that was always writing.

Always, always for myself.

Maybe I was lucky my parents had no expectations about my writing career that I was able to experiment without the burden of fulfilling the stereotypical overachiever ideal our Asian ancestors set for us eons ago.

Noone was there saying, Sure, you’re executive editor of the college paper but it’s not The Harvard Crimson.

Or

Sure, you got a newspaper job but it isn’t The New York Times.

Or

Sure, you’re writing for a big brand but it’s not THE BIGGEST MOST FAMOUS BRAND OF ALL THE TIME.

If the ancestors did say those things, I have no recollection of it because I’m stubborn AF and probably just ignored them anyway.

In any case, I just got to exist. I got to decide for myself what a writer could be and what forms the stories that did burn inside of me could take. I got to define what success was.

This meant I could explore different types of writing: essays, journalism, copywriting, comics, sketch comedy, and weird side projects. As a staff writer at a newspaper, I used to turn rather serious news stories into comedic pieces—and got in trouble for it. Not with the ancestors but with the elected officials of the things I was covering (whoops). These days I slip my voice into my client work. It mostly dies, but when it makes it out into the world boy am I chuffed.

So, when the time came to finally listen to that voice inside of me that wouldn’t let me forget the story that had to be told, I just let it take whatever form it wanted to take.

Which, had I stuck to my old dreams, wouldn’t have happened at all.

Remember, this is what child me thought my book would be:

Instead, here’s what it ended up as:

Here’s what child me thought I would look like writing it:

Here’s what I actually looked like:

Truly the best pic I’ve ever taken, btw. Point is, modern devices powered by electricity were involved.

LIFE. Amiright?

*

I wish I had a defining anecdote I could include here about the moment I decided to let go of my childhood dreams of writing The Book.

But I don’t have one.

Sometimes that’s how it happens, I guess. After 30+ years of writing, I learned that big revelations don’t always come with a dramatic climax or lightbulb moment. Sometimes the longing for some specific ideal quietly disappears into a general forgetting before, if you keep writing long enough, it resurfaces years later as something else, acting like it had been there all along.

And in a way, it had.

Subscribe now