Yesterday, when I’d woken up, I was prepared to embark on my regular weekend morning — nursing a hangover by drinking a ton of coffee in bed. And reading.
I got up. Filled the pot, put the grounds in with a little dried eggshell (takes out the acidity). And turned it on.
And minutes later, nothing. Nothing. Not even a spurt, not even a drip for my “drip” machine, as I tell the guy at the place where I pick up my coffee beans.
I had to sit with myself and my hangover and the chaos of the night before. Writing a novel, roaming around. Lately, I’ve been working on it while drinking. I don’t really mean to, it just sort of happens that way. I think about what Whitman used to say about Faulkner, I think. That you can tell when he gets drunk because he does start to write a little differently. But those are my favorite Faulkner passages — the ones that just feel like raw psyche, like a tooth pulled out, oozing from the root of it.
I like sticking with a few writers I love and moving through their discography because you sort of grow with them. As people. You see their effort in living and getting through life. (I only really find new new books at the library).
I’ve been working on a novel for 5 years. I started it the year I went to my first fashion week. I remember sitting in Ingrid’s office trying to explain to her what it felt like to be a teenage beauty queen, rolling up at fashion week hungover (even then!) and feeling the eyes of others look past you because you were meek and 5’4” and unassuming.
Lately, I’ve been getting approached a lot differently. A lot of people have been asking my if I’m a model, and I reply “no, I’m a writer.” At one of Griffin’s sets, this one man from New Orleans had been persistent (good persistent?) (and quick to drop that he "creative directs" for a very well known R&B musician).
“I’m 5’4”!” I told him, nursing the Gin and Tonic he’d bought me when I’d turned down something else.
“Baby, that doesn’t matter when you look like you,” he said. Flattery or wherever. I had wanted to model when I was younger. I’d work out watching old VS fashion shows, but as I get older I wonder how much of that was innate desire and how much of it was early 2010s media and a digital fantasy.
I think for our generation one of the biggest battles is listening to ourselves, our innate desires to understand what we really love and who we really want to be. Which takes real effort. Silence. Slowing down a lot.
I walked to the store, without my phone to get a new coffee machine. All they had left were French Presses and suddenly I was back in Germany with my ex where we’d bought one from IKEA.
I used to make it some mornings, he others before going off to practice. We loved stuff like that. Ritual. Tradition.
I’d sit, with him gone and nurse a coffee and read. It was beautiful in some ways and I’ve been craving that slowness again, which is in part why I think I’m so rah rah about Lover Girl Fall. Love, real love is slow. It’s comfortable and patient and peaceful. And it’s not easy, it requires real effort.
I brought the French Press home. My roommate commented on it. That she’d been about to buy one. I told her that now we had one. For me, Lover girl Fall is just as much about self love, platonic love, familial love. Taking what we often pour into the consumerism focused fantasy of love — all glitter and wings and beachy waves and kisses — and putting it back into the people who are really there for you, whether you’re at a stage in life where you’ll get mistaken for a model or a lost child or maybe even looked over.
NYFW has taken me over with mixed emotions. Reflections of now, of other points in my life. Dante, a friend of mine, talked about how places that you usually love or like to go become run over with people from out of town during fashion week. Like Lucky’s Steakhouse, a place I was considering making a mainstay to write at because I had a dream about it and then this stranger in NoHo just looked at me and unprompted went “You’re Lucky!” A few days back. Last night my friend and I went back and the hostess said they were all booked up and the empty tables outside were reserved.
Dante said this after I hopped in the basket of his city bike and hitched a ride home, feeling like a child. Feeling love of the world, like a child.
Felipe, a bartender and good friend of mine commented on how crowded the restaurant was.
“Fashion week” I said.
“That’s what everyone keeps saying” he said. Then he gave me chocolate he’d melted down into chips and later I baked them into chocolate chip cookies (my mother’s recipe!) and brought them back for everyone. I’ve been baking so many cookies lately. Partially to have something to do, to try out different iterations of a recipe and partially because I’ve landed at this place in my life and in this draft of the novel where I’m a little bit afraid of baking and food and weekends and being mistaken for a model, or not. You move through it or whatever. Fiction is like that for me. Moving through memories. Which is hard. It takes effort to get from a Dostoevsky who hates the world to one who can write about patricide and still land at a place of love.
I'm still young, right? Maybe these early years are when I do the processing. The frenetic revisiting of past filled with guilt and shame and confusion. Then, maybe the next novel will be an imagining of something. Less of an exhumation of pain, more of a build up of love? Is it all love? All art, all writing?
What is love. What is effort. What is life. You wake up. You keep doing it. You feel some semblance of purpose if you can find a through line in the memories and cultivate enough silence to listen to yourself, whatever a self may be.
I keep thinking about effort lately. Because of the process to automate, how it’s goal is almost always reducing effort. I think about summer intern Haley and she now has to teach her students the value in delayed gratification.
This man I’m quite smitten with and I talk about this and AI a lot. I said something about how AI could be good if you get it to do something like sweeping so you can do more of the stuff you love.
He pointed out that if you sweep the room yourself, it means more to you. Because you did it yourself. Like me with this coffee sitting in a cup on a book on my bed, having been made with a French Press. (and, when you leave the apartment, you can't accidentally leave a French Press on. What does that mean. What does that mean?")
We had our own NYFW event last night. It was tiny and niche and esoteric and I have to say I think pretty chic! And people I love were there with me. Real love, not that runway stuff.
Fashion week has me on this big kick of getting rid of clothes. I went to buffalo exchange yesterday. I was the third in line, reading as this woman yelled at the people there for not wanting her banana republic something something. When I get to the counter and handed Garret (Grayson?? Gary??) my ID, they said
“Your from Kansas? I’m from Kansas”
“No fucking way” I said.
That felt lovely. Was that love? Finding the through line of our experiences. Some form of kinship.
I took my remaining items to second street even though they lost my last batch and apparently the batch of the woman in front of me in line this time. And whatever they don’t take, I’ll leave on the sidewalk in this spot where I know someone who needs it will take it. Where I left the leftover cookies from my batch two batches ago. Giving things away takes vulnerability, which takes effort.
I think about writing here, as that, like Leigh Stein has written a few times. You have to give some of your words away. To share. That’s love. Writing is effort (though a necessary kind). Sharing it is love.
Somehow after a gin and tonic at Ketchy Shuby and a martini at Raf’s and another at Hot Literati’s NYFW event, I’m not hungover this morning. But I simply think it’s because I wasn’t writing. Because I wasn’t working on the novel.
Real effort. Real effort. This draft, which I started in that little German kitchen with my first French press is now the length of Notes from Underground. I was a different girl when I started it. I am a different woman now. It will be done eventually, but for now, I’m going to make another cup of coffee in my French Press and get on a call with the Hot Literati team and go outside and live and love and write.
What else is there to do?
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