Writing is a kind of fate. There are only certain things you can write on certain days.
This morning I woke up & tried to write a sunrise report for the internet. I wanted to write with mad excitement about yesterday because that’s how it felt (America was American so quickly,) – but I couldn’t because today is a new day & I’ve woken up feeling fake
And guilty.
I’ve confessed. I couldn’t work out why I couldn’t write at first but then I realised its because the emotions were “bad” & why would people on the internet want to read about my “bad emotions” I want to uplift – or do I just need to divulge?
Isn’t that what all of this is about?
Isn’t divulging good for combatting the hellish tidiness of the insta-square?
Yes. Yes it is.1
The limits of empathy are real but the limits of anticipated complex experience are even realer. I tend to meet people as fully formed characters. I feel nauseous. Confessions won’t get rid of this one I have to shit. I am sexy. I shit and I am sexy. Or, I shit whilst I am sexy. Or is there a but in there? Fat digression running the point. Always. I like to talk about poo but that’s for somewhere else.
You realise we’ve all been programmed to be turned on by poo right?
We spent a good many years making ourselves warm runny & wet in the imperfect igloos of our own nappies & I’m sure it felt nice. At least once. But the point I’m trying to make here, is, and I should relegate myself to 1, but I know it’s going to be 2:
I take a perverse kind of pleasure in desecrating my public image and/or feel a kind of duty to reveal myself intimately, online, because I struggle to see other people as “real” out there [on the internet] (experiencing myriad emotions)
This one exists strangely alongside 1. but I’ve got to say it because it’s why I’m writing today. I want to advise you on how to seduce me. And yourself. Ultimately.
I’m getting dressed. It’s 6am and my moms in bed coding a website on her laptop – “where are you going?” she’s alarmed “but there’s an hour until sunrise?”
Mom I say, it’s like catching a plane, you have to get there an hour before if you want some drama
“Don’t trespass on other people’s land” she says “you’ll get shot. This is America.”
It’s hilly out here so I run to the flattest point I know. If there’s no water nearby that’s the highway bro. I’m sat on a wooden gate looking out and writing to the swell of cars without fall
But then I stop myself
Writing I mean.
I’ll explain why. It’s all part of the seduction.
I go back to the house and drink “cowboy coffee” with my grandma’s boyfriend. When I enter he says,
“Go to Mormor. Bring her back to reality she’s chanting numbers again.”
It’s true I can hear her from the bedroom so I go and it doesn’t take long for us to start laughing & I'm joining in with the counting it’s all Bend it like Beckett with her OMG–––wait. This is my chance. This is my chance to learn how to chat shit. The boy I fancied in London was showing off to me recently. He said something completely random & I looked confused. He explained,
“I’m chatting shit.”
I was impressed. This exists in contradistinction to something he said weeks before,
“You’re such a woman. I’ve never heard you chat shit.”
At the time I heard it as a compliment
Because I liked being thought of such a woman by such a man
But in reality I hate it
My lack of chat shit displays autistic inability to separate myself from reality or the truth for one sec
Why is why I respect the ability of this particular person to say something nonsensical
On demand
Of course we all know that articulating nonsense on demand is not “chatting shit”
I think “chatting shit” is the verbal consequence of an abstract desire to speak – a desire I’ve been feeling rarely recently – sometimes I speak with others because it’s the done thing because I understand that’s how groups work and it’s important - necessary actually - for myself to contribute to feel like a genuine part otherwise I risk feeling bored, or alienated, but to speak for nothing, to speak for the sake of talk - to contribute nothing in terms of wisdom, ego-embellishment, mine or yours, – now that’s a great thing I’d love to learn & I decide rolling sounds around my mouth with my mormor that this is my chance.
I started fancying somebody new
But let me tell you why I really liked him
Because it feeds into this piece. It’s kinda a sexy learning curve
Serves as propaganda for your life too
–I couldn’t sustain a routine in London
But routine is something you need.
Because w/o routine you don’t post your sunshine reports
Like in London I wrote 3 sunshine reports
But in London I posted 0 of them
I didn’t even have an excuse
But you meet people in London. Cool ones too
This one in particular stuck in my mind & I’m going to tell you why
He,
Unlike me
Maybe unlike you?
Has a routine. A very clear routine.
& he most definitely reaps the benefits from this routine – potentially even more than he realises, see
There are mitigating circumstances for this awe
I grew up with people without routine
So for me it’s kinda wild
The idea of someone doing the same thing
Every day
Of course part of the clincher is that he’s also self-governed (unemployed?)
But still
At similar times
Everyday
I can imagine what he’s doing
So it’s
Literally
Very dreamy
Something I’ve always half heartedly despised about chirpsing is the amount of time it takes
Nursing the connection
Hours months weeks spent on the connection devices
Especially if you’re writers you go hand in hand with the crafting of the care knit knit knit
Knitting the jumper of your love
How many threads?
Sooooooooo many threads.
But some questions will always prevail, like
What are you doing?
That’s an important one. Let me visualise you I need to visualise you what are you doing?
So here’s the great part if you’re a workaholic chirpsing someone with a routine: you don’t even need to ask.
Now, I am not
Monogamous
because of heart I am
Monogamous because of time
And its limitations
I can’t write to
Two individuals at once
I can’t break
Up my experience
Into identical parts
For two different people
In my life
I’ve always emphasised the wrong thing - it’s not: I’m going away, tell me if you sleep with someone else, it’s: I’m going away, and I may or may not think about you every day – but if I do,
Does that bear resemblance to love or to fiction?
Do I love you or have you just captured my imagination?
Let me tell you how to capture my imagination. Create a routine.
I’m working on mine now.
It’s useful because it becomes a way of self-regulating what you’re doing at any given time like this morning I went out to watch sunrise clasping my diary and my pen - but then I thought, no. Fail. Put down the pen. You are not “watching sunrise and writing” that’s not catchy.2 You need your routine to be catchy if you want it to stick. Plus are you really watching sunrise if you’re writing? What kind of weird position does that leave you in? On a pair of damp steps with a diary on your lap ––ew. No. Get up. Devote yourself to sunrise. If there’s any other activities in parentheses here it’s breathe – breathe consciously. For at least the no. of years you’ve been alive plus the one you spent inside your mom for good luck
And the petal pieces are falling into a shape
My routine is slow dawning
The choice of words matters here
Step 1: Rise (much better than wake) one hour before the sun does (include healthy sense of competition);
Step 2: Run to your local highest point;
Step 3: Watch it, roll your eyes, slowly;
Step 4: Go home. Learn how to write/chat shit.
Because the point is
I want you to be able to access me wherever you are
I want you to look at the clock & have a rough sense of what it is you think I might be doing and I want you to know that if the sun is rising I’ll be sitting on a gate with my head getting blown off by the colours not quite but at least there’ll be a moment where I stop dead wait. Did I take K last night? Is this the afterglow? No
But the world is so sharp right now?
So crisp? So clear?
Oh right it’s just the American air –– and then at some point i’ll walk back, re-enter the house, offer an American person some tea (they’ll say no, no thanks but i’ll persist, Please? No thanks i just had some coffee. So i’ll try harder still you know it makes me feel homesick when people decline my tea? Oh they say, well ok, give us a tea then so i’ll make them a tea and feel really happy about it even though I kinda forced their hand because really it’s nice to share a pot of tea even if only figuratively because of course literally i’ll pour the tea for us then take one cup back to my tiny desk where i’ll strategise quietly about how I want you to visualise me.
––but the reality is,
Routines just don’t seem real to me?
Routines seem like fictional devices
For successful characters
Steps to dance routines
For YouTube barristers
But i’m working on it, my routine. So, patience. Please.
I’ll let you know as I go.
When I have it it’ll be really catchy, like the Macarena. Then you’ll think of me.
Sweet seeing,
Tilly
I met someone recently and then I read their Substack and I was so grateful and freaked out but mostly grateful because suddenly they were real to me.
I’m an inner child already so I need to talk to myself like a boss. That’s why I do so many full stops.