On Twitter

Just a quick note to say that I am now on twitter. You can find me here.

I have been really impressed with the bare bones design to twitter. Its simplicity is its virtue. Keeping an updated message that is under 140 characters is a challenge, and can be something of an art form. Not to say that I have mastered the twitter, but I am trying to update it as often as I have something to say.

Be one with the twitter.
May the twitter be with you.
This is the sound of one twitter clapping.

Really?

It's on now.

The Writing of...Portrait of Artist in Early December

It was March 2000, and I was living in Athens with the Scotts. We had moved in with one another during the holidays of 1999. I really had no idea what I was going to do with myself, or how long our shared living situation would last. I think all of us were just trying to buy ourselves some time before something resembling what we thought of as real life began. I don't want to speak too much for their feelings at the time, but I will say that there was a constant sense that our living situation was temporary, meaning we knew we were on borrowed time from the beginning. That is representative of how volatile our collective friendship was, and probably also reflected how volatile we were as individuals. There was a sense that we were all there because we had nowhere else better to be and were hoping that we might stumble onto something that would give us some semblance of normalcy.

Part of the reason for the volatility of our living situation was that we were all stubborn writers, and wanted nothing more than to have time to write, and oftentimes this meant we were living off of thin air financially. So, at the time this story was written, the cracks were starting to show on the delicate nature of our living situation. To put it simply, there was an acknowledgment taking hold in the house that it was all about to fall apart, and I think the Scotts and I were starting to realize that our time together was growing short. And given our financial shortfalls, we were heading toward dangerous waters. There was something incredibly sad and sudden about this realization.

All of a sudden rent wasn't being paid. Bills were stacking up and being largely ignored. The worst part was that these financial woes were weighing heavily on our personal friendships. Tense silences were beginning to develop and envelop our normally rich, textured conversations. Also, we just weren't being very kind to one another, which really was a tragedy. We knew we understood each other in a way that is not easily duplicated. We stopped acknowledging the rarefied air that we breathed together, and so we started suffocating in that house.

From this, I began to search myself for what this time would ultimately mean to me in retrospect. It was obvious at this point that Sarah and I were going to be together in the long term. We had already decided to move to Cleveland, where Sarah was going to continue her education. So, this bachelor arrangement of mine with the Scotts, and even the old untethered freedom that I had experienced with other friends in general, would be forever altered. I was about to enter into a world of new responsibilities, and I had to address, in my own mind, how this would affect my friendships. There is a clear distinction that needs to be made between a youthful bachelor existence and the acceptance of a more domestic life. Things were simply not going to be the same.

This was a reflective time for me, and this reflection took me, eventually, to an image, an image of a young man standing at a large window. The man standing at the window was both me and not me. He was at the window, looking out at the snow, the reflection from Christmas lights blinking on his naked torso. This was an image that I wanted to explore through the prism of a future reunion of old friends. How would a group of friends react to this image after years have past, and the individual from the image--a once integral member of their circle--had been absent for years.

This is how I began Portrait of Artist in Early December. It was the third installment in my Weekend Stories series, and it is a story of nostalgia, a story that lives in the recognition that the world as I knew it was about to shift into a different gear. I was wondering how I would be seen by friends in the future, and how I might view my friends from the prism of the future. That being said, the artist in the story is not necessarily me. It is me, but it is also an amalgam of my friends at the time, and represents the feelings I had toward them.

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when this story was written because my journals were so sporadic during this period, but I am guessing that it was written on March 17 and 18th of 2000. At the time, I remember being quite proud of the piece, even reading it aloud to the Scotts soon after it was completed. However, as I looked at it again recently, I didn't feel that it held up the way I hoped it might. This is the first of the weekend stories that I really believe shows that it was hurried by the time restriction. More than a few of the sentences are poorly constructed, sometimes to the point of losing the thread. And there are times that reading the paragraphs are like watching a tennis match, bouncing from one point to another with a clumsy casualness.

Overall, though, I am posting the story because I think that the story carries the point I tried to convey, that we romanticize our youth, and most of all we romanticize those that have stayed young as we age. In other words, we mythologize the characters from our youth whom were lucky enough to escape time through the decoration of our memories.

Read Portrait of Artist in Early December

Read the printer-friendly version