Monday Morning

Boris and me. He’s an old man cat, happy to sit in a lap and get some head scratchins.

Monday morning, and [in my best Bernie Sanders’ voice] I am once again sitting at my desk, trying to scrape together words to compensate for the dearth of recent blog posts. I want to write something that expands large enough to fill the void, but the void I’m so often trying to dam isn’t one of post frequency; it’s the beating question: how can I know I am here / when have I done enough? 

I am here: in Boulder, in a little yellow house at the top of a hill, in an office that every afternoon fills like a cistern with yellow light. I’m not always here in the afternoons, since I got a job to help pay rent on the yellow house. I’m working as a cashier at the local liquor store: a position I find gratifying in its unexpectedness, its ordinariness, its lack of profound demands. I process payments for alcohol some twenty hours a week, and in the mornings I sit at the cast iron patio furniture like an island floating in the long grass of the backyard, and I try to scrape together words to make meaning or entertainment out of my life. 

My advisor is challenging me, pushing me in directions I wouldn’t have selected for myself but that feel surprisingly innate. I’m writing funny things, or trying to, and it gives me the freedom to be as wild and outrageous as I’ve always wanted to be: as I’ve always been, but haven’t had the outlet for. 

According to one imaginary trajectory, this season is a preparatory one. Its value is in preparing me for a future career or job-arrangement that will suggest greater success, accomplishment, arrival. And yet—I’m sitting in a burnt orange desk chair with soft morning light cascading down on me like a waterfall. My family’s oldest cat, Boris Smirnoff, is sleeping in my arms: head resting in the crook of my elbow, furred sack of bones stretched out along my lap; one white-socked paw pressed up against my writing wrist. I’m writing perhaps more than ever before, submitting at least one brief essay a week, receiving feedback, developing my craft. There is no pressure to alchemize my creativity into currency, because I get paid for checking people out at the liquor store, so I can test the creative waters without fear of drowning, without the need to paddle to the other side. This is everything I could hope for in my writing life.