Tuesday, 1700h.
Thursday, October 31st, 2002Marie called up and asked why the site hadn’t been updated lately, and I didn’t have an answer. I never have an answer. I don’t think I need an answer. I update the site when I feel like it, and if I don’t that’s okay with me too.
She said something about not being able to follow through on any of my big plans, that everything I ever attempt to do was bound to fail. Not because the ideas weren’t good, of course, but because I didn’t have the work ethic to bring them to fruition. Which is true. My work ethic sucks. I’ve essentially failed out of school; Brilliant Young & Angsty is three weeks delayed and who knows whether it will come out in time for the release party.
“But so what?” I told her. “To finish something is to diminish it.”
God, I wish I could have seen the look on her face after I said that. Goes completely against her work ethic, which apparently now includes riding on other people to make them do shit also. “That’s not true at all. That’s only true because you’re lazy, and on the occasions that you do actually finish something, it never lives up to the vision you had for it in your own mind.”
“Because the vision is always more pure than what I put out.” With a click of the mouse I bring up the Word document I was working on. “Look. I’m looking at a brilliant article right now, about the war on Iraq and why it’s a bad idea. I’ve got over two hundred pages of research–that I’ve read all of–for this article. I have the perfect sense for how I’m going to write this article. And yet it’s stuck on page 2.”
“At some points, Nick, you’ve got to sit down and just push your way through it.” She sighs and I look out my window. There’s no snow, like they said it would this weekend. There’s only the rain and the falling leaves, and the grey squirrels (the black squirrel mutation apparently doesn’t exist this far south) scampering about, trying to store food for the winter. “You wait until the last minute to get something done, and then you go complaing about how it isn’t done and it won’t be any good. Just sit down and do it.”
“Okay,” I said, and I hung up the phone.
Outside, on my porch, the old green couch that the old residents left is getting soaked by rain falling off the roof. Beer cans and cigarette ashes and three-day-old copies of the Times cover the bus seat (which, incidentally, is on the opposite side of the porch and red). The cold was seeping back into Charlottesville, and for the first time I was truly cold in October here, having been readjusted by the unpleasant heat of a Blue Ridge summer. I lit a cigarette and waited. I know fully well that Marie doesn’t exist, that I made her up for the purposes of a story, or the manifestation of the part of me that still wants to do everything, but none of that matters. I sat down and waited for her to show up anyway.