The sky is ready

Over the past few days, I've been listening to Arthur Russell's "Close My Eyes" a lot and singing along. I'm trying to understand why the line "I know the sky is ready" is the one that always makes me cry. I think it's because it's such a pure expression of queer longing.

Of course, it's not just about the line itself but the place it occupies in the song. This is a song about secretly meeting a lover in a corn field at night. A lover that the speaker calls "my friend." And a meeting that takes place "away from my sister and brother." The line comes toward the end of the final verse. He stumbles slightly on the line "The air is sweet and steady" and then his voice takes on an especially soft tone in the next line "And flowers bloom out of sight." These little details are probably coincidental, but they imbue the performance with a vulnerability that suggests nervousness or hesitation about the upcoming meeting. Crucially, the song does not describe the meeting but the anticipation of it. So the next line, the one that makes me cry, feels like an assertion, like he's trying to convince himself that they've waited long enough. It's time. "I know the sky is ready / Come meet me down here tonight."

There's a lot going on for me, emotionally, when I listen to this song. The chords, the melody, the words, but also the performance, the recording quality. Even the picture of Arthur Russell on the cover of the album, in that extremely queer pose, standing in a field with his arms crossed, in his white sweater and cowboy hat. And knowing who he was and the life he lived and how and why he died. (And the many other queer men who died for the same reason.) And that the same man who wrote such a sweet and simple love song about queer longing also produced iconic disco anthems and avant-garde cello and voice music. And finally, mixed with all that, my own memories and ambitions and disappointments and queer longings.

Writing is torture

I had three conversations this week about writing. Two of them took place on my couch, on two different days, with two different nude men. (A coincidence.) The other one was in response to something my friend wrote:

so I was making a smoothie after writing the above and I just began to sing a little made up phrase to myself . it was soothing and heartfelt and so beautiful to me in that moment. i don’t think words can do that for me. it feels to me the creative process of writing has an extra step that music and visuals do not. there is an added layer of thought/ consciousness / abstraction from the heart or world. it calls attention to itself like a Strawberry Shortcake doll ..

I mean, first of all, flawless punctuation. But more importantly, fuck, that's relatable. I have been wanting to start sending out newsletters again since the beginning of the summer, which, for me, started around May 1st once I had somewhat recovered from my first two semesters of grad school. Here I am, 42 days later, still trying to write a newsletter. I think I might actually finish this one and send it. But yes, this "added layer of thought" is the problem with writing. It's why drawing has been so therapeutic for me the past few years. When I want to draw something, I just put the pen to the paper and start making lines. There is no thought involved. It just flows out of me onto the page. That's what I've always wanted to achieve with writing. It's the stupid lie I was sold by Jack Kerouac as a dumb 20-year-old and I've never been able to get over it. I always saw my inability to sit down and pump out thousands of words a day as a failure.

So I said to one of the naked men on my couch, the one who talked about his first published novel and the novel he's now proofreading and the novel he's about to start writing, I said, "I've always wanted to write a book, but I don't think I can do it because writing is torture."

But today, the universe answered me in the form of this post from Eryk Salvaggio on Bluesky:

Thomas Mann said that "a writer is someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people." This is a reason writers hate generative AI: people who thought writing was easy never cared what the words said, and the LLM is a typewriter for when you don't give a shit.

It all just sort of clicked into place. It's obvious. Writing is hard because I care, because I'm invested in it, and that's not a failure.

I will keep trying to write. And once in a while I may succeed. And when I do, my words can land directly into your inbox if you sign up for my newsletter.

Bonus notes

• I'm starting a new job and I'm excited about it. I'll tell you about it some other time.
• I have become a pen fiend. I can't stop buying metal pens.
• There's some hot (prosthetic) zombie dick in 28 Days Later: The Bone Temple. Follow me on Letterboxd. I haven't been watching a lot of movies, because I'm spending all my screen time on Star Trek: Voyager.
• I want to (and perhaps will) write about archives, bathhouses, social nudity, classification...
• I did not proofread this post.