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<h1>Zk | 032</h1>
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<p>date: 2020-02-17
weight: 32</p>
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<blockquote>
<p>My turn.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Shoot.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You said: &ldquo;you are not the project, but there is no project without you.&rdquo;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yes, that applies to us both.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You have spoken to your compulsive need to overshare, and you have spoken to the fact that the act of writing and selling a book is, in its own way, the act of selling yourself. <strong>Restless Town</strong> and <strong>Eigengrau</strong> are not so firmly tied to you as this, however. <strong>Rum and Coke</strong> certainly is not. I don&rsquo;t think you could say the same about this. Speak to your ties to this project.</p>
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<p>Do you suspect that it is too personal to sell?</p>
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<p>You asked my feelings on the matter.</p>
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<p>I&rsquo;m of two minds on the matter.</p>
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<p>Har har.</p>
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<p>Thank you. Seriously, though, I can see two different sides of this.</p>
<p>I feel like I&rsquo;m putting my maddest edges, as Jon Ronson puts it, on display. In the process of working on this project, I was forced to confront some of the most difficult aspects of my life by its very nature.</p>
<p>In the process of pulling the book together, I was forced to reread much of what I had written, and there are parts of it where my words burn too hot, or get too slippery to hold. There&rsquo;s a feverish quality to them. It&rsquo;s something that felt good to write purely for the sensation of it bursting forth from me in uncontrollable torrents.</p>
<p>These maddest edges are something that are integral to the project. You, after all, are one of the, and this project is named after you.</p>
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<p>Is it mad to have a six month long therapy session with an imaginary interlocutor?</p>
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<p>This is both more and less than that, and you know it.</p>
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<p>Yes.</p>
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<p>It would be &lsquo;mad&rsquo;, I suppose, were I to believe that you were an <em>actual</em> interlocutor. It would be &lsquo;mad&rsquo; were I to present these things as a universal worldview. It would be &lsquo;mad&rsquo;, awful as that word is, were I anything but deliberate with this project.</p>
<p>As it is, I summoned you. I started pulling down bits of nostalgia when my I was shutting down my Dreamhost account, when I went to lock my ancient LiveJournal. I got the idea to write, so I did. It was a deliberate effort.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Is that mad?</p>
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<p>&hellip;huh.</p>
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<p>A question for another time. Tell me of your two minds.</p>
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<p>Right.</p>
<p>On the one hand, I read back through all of this and I find myself tasting blood. Who is this Madison? Is she okay? She seems to be having a rough time of things sometimes, and at others she doesn&rsquo;t seem wholly sane, or at least not wholly healthy. That&rsquo;s a scary thing for someone to put on display. What could possibly lead someone to do that? Some strange form of self-flagellation?</p>
<p>And on the other, while I&rsquo;m most certainly not wholly healthy, I am, at my core, a storyteller. A young one, and certainly one of uneven quality, but I&rsquo;m learning and improving by doing. There are stories to be told here, with my life, and that&rsquo;s what I&rsquo;m doing. I&rsquo;m making them interesting. I&rsquo;m embellishing some of them. Hell, I&rsquo;m making some stuff up wholesale. And I&rsquo;m doing all of this for the specific purpose of it being read as a story.</p>
<p>In the end, it&rsquo;s the storyteller that wins out over the concerned, private individual. If I can&rsquo;t <em>not</em> overshare, if I must compulsively tell stories, then I&rsquo;m going to tell the stories I have and I&rsquo;m going to make them worth reading.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A friend once asked Maddy, &ldquo;Why do you shout carefully constructed, thoroughly edited, well rehearsed speeches into the void?&rdquo;</p>
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<p>Maddy replied, &ldquo;It pays the bills.&rdquo;</p>
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<p>Page generated on 2020-06-24</p>
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