May Day
“See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write - on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there....”
The first post of May is a cry for help.
May Day #1: May 2021
As a writing professor, I encourage my students to keep a notebook a la Joan Didion. I give them notebooks and assignments, but they rarely keep up. To be fair, I am not that great at it either. But I thought an appropriate way to start off this year’s May Day blog would be to look back over the three years of May posts I did keep. The first one, linked above, is from 2021 and Covid—you remember, right? In looking back on it, I am remembering the burdenless ease of time when you had nothing to do because you could do nothing.
May Day #2: May 2022
By year two of Covid, I was out of clever ironies and already on to recycling (a pattern I seem to enjoy). In this blog, I was literally asking for help. Any help. Please help.
May Day #3: May 2023
In year three, I seem to have pushed out of desperation into a Rilke/Taylor Swift mash-up. This is also my first mention of Mercedonius as my May practice. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that is—you can Google it—or just wait a bit. I promise it will come up in the next few days.
So there is all is—forgotten but with accumulated interest—what I am supposed to do. Because I have not even been going through the motions of writing lately but, unsurprisingly, I found some paper here in the waiting room.
