incoherency

a year of entries

hello,
in may 2024, I signed off my last substack with “until sometime next year,” meaning 2025, this year that is about to end. wanting to stick to that word, I’m sending to you all a collection of journal entries from the past twelve months. I encourage you all to read these in the spirit of fiction, curiosity, and play. most of these, I think, deal with writing process and authorhood, though it can be hard for me to understand what I’m actually writing about when I’m writing in the style I write these entries. so it can also be up to you to decide what I’m writing about.
I hope you all are writing, too.
k.e.r

jan 1
well I’ve always tried my best to tell my side of things.

jan 3
my sentences are consistently awful but the nausea doesn’t come anymore, can keep attention through hundreds of words, a thousand yesterday without even noticing the word count ticking at the bottom of the window. again, an opening rewritten, darlings axed. the impetus for the story now more immediate, think I get ready for work and the [blank] has been [blank] for [blank] hours. it’s always the same story. I feel contentious in a way I don’t care to soften. unsure who’s taken over from who–the sphinx from the girls, the girls from the bug eyed feral thing. yesterday while watching the shining, when the twins first appeared on screen, I thought, there they are. I joked to a. that he’d be equally horrified if he read my drafts. I promised I wouldn’t murder him. “I’m not worried,” he said. “I know who your victims are.”

jan 4
if everyone around me were writing their own novels, I’d be so much happier. (and this is the real kicker: so would everyone else.)

jan 6
I am genuinely positively teeming with visions. wrote a decent amount of decent sentences today. the treatment of the big thing is turning more assured, because the sacrifice is more or less complete. realized another obvious reason why I wanted to watch the shining the other day—it’s the classic example of the adaptation conflict, authorial (loss of) control. thinking now of the scene nab wrote in the lo screenplay, of h.’s mother ascending to heaven or whatever.

a vivid moment arrived this afternoon: k. and l. on the a cushioned, carpeted floor. k. says something about nab not bringing [redacted] into that first [redacted]. what a miss! but it leaves, for k., a nice opening. she says, “it’s almost as if I could reach up, get my hand in there…” the two of them are not sober. they’re tripping, I guess. she’s saying something about the drought, the real-life fire, the machine six years later making it rain. she’s trying to string it all together while lukas looks on, head propped on his fist, his smile tender as hell. it’s the way his eyes trailed over her. I saw it in my head and stopped in my tracks. I’m able now to admit he wants to sleep with her but it’s not just that. it’s not cruel or basic. most of his excitement comes from watching her think.

jan 16
stop being so fucking paranoid and allow in your world the potential for genius.

jan 20
I keep feeling waves of peace that feel like echoes of childhood, the good parts. car rides to happy places.

jan 29
I have NOTHING to say and NOTHING to hide.

feb 3
currently dealing with recalibration. I shifted my mass for the first time in forever and set off a modest earthquake so now everything’s sloshing around. a new level settles. I got a glimpse of grief today, a vision of me having to sacrifice more than I want to allow. don’t even want to think about it on the chance thinking about it makes a difference. I don’t want to lose anything I have now, honestly can’t bear to imagine anything more taken from me, but that I’m even putting it that way, “taken from me,” points to an obvious truth--that I’m clinging, and by clinging, making myself more vulnerable than I need to be.
torn up and willing
I am the most shameless girl alive,
begging a god half-believed to treat me gently

feb 14
what I’m writing sucks but is also too good, hot to the touch. I am honest and unfurling. I am writing a flood. it will hurt others more than it will hurt me. that’s life, though. or at least that’s been life so far. maybe I’m a bad person. and so what if I am? I can’t write without that particular passenger/potential. I remember teaching freshmen how to write essays, marking up their drafts with the most berating questions I could think of. so what so what why should I care? I knew everything. I was twenty-two years old in front of a classroom, chalk in hand.

feb 22
IT’S INSANE, THE AMOUNT OF SECRETS I AM ABLE TO KEEP.

feb 26
where is my peace? where is my value. I know I can write what I need to write but it’s difficult, difficult enough to make me feel lost in the middle of the afternoon, wandering from room to familiar room. I write a thousand words of notes on a scene that scares me. I have incredible skill. I hide it when I meet new friends. they bring their children and in their presence I watch my words. I am old-fashioned. I drink tea in the fellowship hall. I’m plagued by end of the world thoughts and tell myself they’re more serious and reasonable than anybody else’s. I check on friends who still post on the apps and decide that they now find me abhorrent, offensive. I comb through the likes of a cruel post about me and familiarize myself with the avatars of my enemies. adults cling to the models they grew up with. rhetoric accuses as it consoles. millennials are not the worst but they might be the easiest to manipulate because it takes so little to convince them the only path forward is penance, isolation, annihilation.

mar 6
substack has become a total misery circus, holy shit. a retirement home where the problematizing thinkpieces go to die.

mar 22
the girl has taken over the publishing industry and there’s nothing anyone can do about it because the girl is the only one who reads.

mar 28
all I’ve done is step out of the pool. you’ll do it too. you’ll look around one day and realize, I can just walk out. and when you do, it will be simple. nothing will stop you.

apr 2
much of my power resides in not being a gossip.

apr 26
love and peace to virginia giuffre.

apr 27
am I regretting how willing I am to put everything on the line in order to make my unreliable narrator as trustworthy as possible? maybe I’ve ruined my reputation forever for telling the truth as a teenager. drawn like a magnet back to pkd, to valis. in a lot of ways what I’ve been experiencing isn’t all that different from what he describes, except he comes across as so damaged, untethered, foolish. I am committed to the bit with all the tenacity of an obsessed schoolgirl. I read and laugh at the idea of pkd taking lsd only twice the way I read tao lin and laugh at him listening to thirty hours of terence and thinking that was enough to write a book. of course I see myself as the better hero.

may 2
I feel curious, as in I feel curiosity about what I’m feeling, but the feeling itself is also curious. it’s ouroboric. a piece of my grand theory of everything snapped into place–I won’t say “locked” because it can change. I’m no fool for permanence. I know it has to do with working on the outline, seeing it all laid out. there are snags but not as many as you might expect. I feel myself retreat so far into the dark, away from the spotlight glare. I hover in a.’s office doorway and tell him what’s on my mind and it feels like twenty-whatever years ago, lingering and loitering around adults I wanted to be. I still feel the old shame but I have all the archetypes at my disposal now. I’m no longer limited to the maiden and her feeble little attempts at magic. I can, for example, cut off the head of an adult from my past I’d rather not remember, and put that severed head on a platter of plot. the shame doesn’t go away but a decapitated man is much more interesting than a humiliated girl. the crowd gawks; the girl slips through the trap door into my age-spotted arms. there you are.

I can see a big shimmering mess. it hovers in place, has curved checkerboard walls. its shape is always morphing, always moving–I guess those are the details sorting themselves out. we’re all inside it, living laughing loving killing. we’re being watched, we’re entertainment, we’re providing insight into a state of being that those watching can’t access without choosing to be born into this. they’re fascinated by our suffering. they’re curious. they choose to jump in. I chose to jump in. I’ll probably choose it again. I think you forget how much it hurts as soon as you’re dead. though writing it down might help you remember. it might be a way out.

may 12
everything freaks me out 😩

may 14
the girls who love my book are sometimes a little too sweet and kind. they often fail at recognizing the villain. I know this is a consequence of being good-hearted, but I get frustrated watching from my perch. I want them to be more shrewd. I put the desire in the draft, where I know it’ll have the best chance at being passed along.

may 15
the friend in middle school you loved deeply, desperately even though she lied about everything and stole from you and left hiccuping, sobbing messages on the answering machine that made your mother demand to know what exactly was going on between you two.

may 19
it’s being forced, for some cruel reason, to contort myself in order to fit this tiny tiny space —> looking around one day and realizing I actually have a ton more room! I can loosen up, move around and explore! —> wandering off too far, setting off a landmine, crouch and protect for cover —> get used to living in a small, contorted way, so used to it I forget the self-created calamity that put me there

may 24
I can’t conjure up a version in which the book didn’t catch and spread, which technically feels like believing I was destined for success, but it’s not a glorified thing, more like a sinking realization. this circus is what I was building all along. I specifically wrote the story the way I did so it would become this spectacle I claim to hate. it’s unsettling.

may 18
I’m becoming interested in john fowles.

jun 6
not using the big apps as vehicles for long game performance art is crazy...not confusing people on purpose is so crazy…

jun 19
I’m doing things with the draft. I’m allowing a certain dynamic to emerge in this new world I’ve created, and it hurts, and feels cruel, but the resentments do finally feel like they’re flowing with the current rather than fighting against. the girl I created is a loser in ways I fled from desperately. I remember two octobers ago, weeping at the thought of having to sacrifice this girl. and it still makes me sad. I’m gearing up for ten nights in a campervan, a roadtrip loop I barely understand bc a. figures these things out. I just go along for the ride and think and write in my head. long stretches of sitting quietly with dirt on my face is my favorite kind of vacation. I will read and I will write and I will walk puppy through new landscapes, channeled scablands and painted hills and a mountain range named--of course, what else--strawberry.

jun 28
leaving new england was the best thing I’ve ever done and moving all the way west is the second. my life now wouldn’t have been possible if I’d stayed. here I get to be so big, a giant star plodding through the fossil beds, the blue mountains, the scrubby terrain.

jul 9
BY EMBRACING HIM, I WILL WIN.

jul 10
I’m in the river canyon, standing on the more-wild and rugged and dangerous side, wet up to my thighs, while every woman I’ve ever known stands huddled on the milder shore. they’re speaking in furious whispers. they’re deciding amongst themselves how to handle my shunning.

jul 16
what a surprise that the girls are the ones thrown under the bus, killed off, or turned into a joke, or a hoax, which is its own form of killing. they never cared they never will. even mid-binge, the metoo gut at its thickest, did it ever run on anything but attention, acceleration, money? we were made fools, some more than others. some watched and took notes for their own reasons, which we see play out now.

jul 17
epstein stuff is cuckoo. makes me feel very big and very small. spiraling.

jul 19
what am I??? still perplexed.

jul 20
every minute that passes with me at the desk makes the draft messier than it ever has been before. everything I touch, I make worse. but there will come a tipping point. it will come together. it might still be years—hate admitting that even as part of me licks my lips at the thought. publishing is torture, its pleasures evil, but process is divine. there is transcendence, suffering, cycles that loop you through the past, launch you into the future. if an author truly has “it,” the vocation-talent-calling-gift, then it’s only natural she would try to work at the pace of tartt. a decade of process paid for by a year of hell. the authors who publish at a frantic pace are outrunning something. they have to be.

jul 24
I love my pets I love these days certain moments feel like childhood when the breeze is right when we’re walking through the woods in the island park and the dappled light is hitting my arms and the dog is romping ahead of me disappearing and reappearing and I have no worries about where I am or who I’m going to see and I know the story in my head is worth something so grand it’ll carry me through this life whether I deserve it or not. four days without overeating hits me like a ton of bricks by how much better it feels, how much easier it is to think. what would it be like to live without being addicted to sugar, to the feeling of food? like not being addicted to other vices, I guess. I love not drinking. I love thinking. I would sooner die than avoid my own brain. the draft sucks. I am on shaky ground but my stamina is unreal. I’m taking care of my hair or trying to. look at this gloopy shit on my hands. I scrunch and sit out on the porch and wait hours for it to air dry. a girl on the phone screen says, I’m an influencer I have all the time in the world. out loud to the empty house I say, I’m an author I have all the time in the world. I check the sales rank on amazon, compare it to others, myself to others. I’m proud but only enough to avoid self-loathing. I want a hot tub. I want christmas in sunriver. I am cradled by something that loves me at least as much as a child loves an amusing pet. if I look at it a certain way, the stakes are sinfully low.

jul 27
I dreamt of him in my house, surrounded by my things, by sisters who aren’t really my sisters. there were home movies, a bathroom I hurried to clean before he could use it. the wife there too, but not the real one the way the sisters weren’t real. at one point I was sat next to her and I slouched and smoldered, spoke in little grunts. in parting he either kissed me on the mouth or in the dream I wanted it to be true so I convinced myself: upon waking please god let me believe it really happened. there was no fear or shame; the wife didn’t hate me. there was some kind of understanding. I was young and interesting.

jul 29
the draft is the most pathetic thing about me.

aug 1
he thought I was nothing but he was wrong.

aug 2
whatever you can’t believe or stomach or admit you did, project that onto me.

aug 7
puppy is so joyful and rowdy. why walk when you can leap and sprint? why be quiet when you can bark and howl? some nights she won’t settle, which used to feel oppressive, like some huge failure, but now feels more fun. I love laying in bed while she digs under the duvet, her wet nose and teeth on my feet. husky grumbles, husky pounces. all you can do is laugh and laugh-scold and laugh-scream. I live for these happy days. I live for the dog who sleeps in the living room to be close to the door but comes to the bedroom at the sound of the alarm, flops on her back between us for belly rubs. she is like tutu but also so much her own, more difficult more independent. she flies off the back of the sofa, flies across the backyard. she’s too much for most people. we’re boarding her for the first time this weekend--will she be ok? I think so, hope so. I’m so attached. giving her a new experience that I won’t experience too feels wrong, like an emergency. she gets twelve years, give or take. how many dogs will I have after her? there are two older ladies who live down the block, almost next door to each other. one has a pit mix, the other a golden. they recommend I try the mobile vet. they have coffee together outside while the golden sunbathes on the sidewalk. I will never not have a dog. I think about the week and a half between tutu and puppy, the fog and the big black hole. I couldn’t think. I was missing something so intrinsic I hesitate to give it a name. the soul sleeping on the couch brings a life force into the home. structure reflection awareness. I remember explaining to someone that getting a dog as an adult forced me to realize how deeply my emotions can affect those around me. when I got agitated and in my head, I’d look over and see tutu watching me, fretting, trying to figure out what was wrong. the sight of her suffering snapped me out of it every time. yesterday afternoon I was working and puppy was patient, wandering in and out of the room, until she decided I was done and began to howl. a dog is so confronting, fighting so fiercely against being ignored.

aug 15
I am LOST, hitting yet another floor. I’m avoiding avoiding avoiding. there has to be some kind of reveal coming in the process, or a lightening, the kind of breakthrough I used to feel. writing a novel is harder than anyone wants to believe. I watch others pick up the pen only to abandon it a few weeks later. making it all up yourself is exhausting, impossible. people assume because they have some words in their heads, the story will flow easily. well, think of all the years of sacrifice I have behind me. did they think I was doing that for the show of it, to be dramatic? while they were being happy and mindless, drunk and paid and fucked, I was crouched over the notebook in my gargoyle pose. maybe that’s what they don’t understand, that the writing happens during the days and nights of choosing the ugly work over fruitless fun. they aren’t me because they would’ve quit, because they have quit, over and over and over. will you quit? if not, you have a chance. if you do, it’s game over. literally the only rule you have to follow is never stop trying, that’s it.

aug 16
being antagonistic is so rarely worth it. letting the sour mood leak even a little is usually a regrettable thing. the world can brim with inspiration but to recognize this, I have to stop being a contrarian child. someone I like mentions a film as inspo I haven’t seen before. I watch it, I see it, catch its meaning. the draft flows a little easier. I’m reacting to the creative current, not the cultural one. culture is for dipping your pail into, not for swimming. if you’re drowning in anything, it’s your own fault. all of this, everything you’re feeling, is eventually your own fault.

aug 17
IT’S TRUE I DO IMBUE MY BLUE UNTO MYSELF I MAKE IT BITTER

aug 18
a girl in a quinceañera dress, red and gold, flocked by handmaidens, crossing a downtown street. a house with doors open and karma police blaring on a sunday evening. a dog that looks like puppy but scrappier, with yellow eyes, first barking but then turning soft and sweet, wanting to sniff thru chain links. the men in tight chinos and button downs, black sunglasses, drinking their coffees outside the capitol.

aug 23
it’s actually disgusting, how scared I am, how much fear holds me back. the chains are sickening not because they’re so heavy but because they aren’t even fucking locked.

sept 9
the men are evil; accept this or die.

sept 20
“do I even like this music anymore?” I ask. maybe it’s just an easy palette for my thoughts about two thousand seven. sam beam singing jezebel jezebel in a voice I know a. will make fun of on the drive home. we’re there for the venue, for our friend g. who just moved back to eugene, for the people watching and the vibe. “everyone is our age!” g. exclaims when she shows up, picking her way across the lawn, between costco pendelton picnic blankets and cuffed pants with no socks and balding heads, highlighted hair. the men in front of me don’t seem like men at all but I know they must be, showing off photos on their phones of houses getting tented for asbestos removal, of a new chicken coop built in the backyard. we are old and nothing is what we thought it would be. band of horses starts and I say to g. and to a., “it’s oh-seven and I’m listening to their second album on my ipod touch.” I don’t say, a couple of these are on the playlists, a couple of these are straight from his mouth. in a town so small, how could anybody not look me in the eye or wave as I drive by? his struggle to accept how quickly, how eager people are to believe he’s a monster. the way he reassures himself that the world is still a wonderful place. he was, and continues to be, seen through my eyes darkly. lyrics about everything going to shit, about wanting a life worth living. millennial grief. what was our great sin, being embarrassing? being hopeful, naive? I hate to think that saving the world comes down to us, hardly think we’re up for it, but is there anyone sane left but us? look at the men around me and try to understand that they are the age he was back in the beginning. I don’t believe it, will go to the grave swearing someone pulled a fast one on me. a. says, “I remember you playing this song as we drove across the salt flats.” in my head, I walk into the dream-room where v. is real, and I send her a text out of nowhere, first one in something like five years. we are the ever-living ghost of what once was. I imagine her receiving it in the middle of whatever her night is, trapped in the web of some man who won’t ever fully understand her. the lyric makes her heart drop. her and I, forever his pretty ghosts.

sept 24
thinking a lot about the psychological torture I might be committing. there is a possibility that I’m legitimately driving a handful of people totally crazy. but name me an alternate resolution that doesn’t entail me being humiliated killed or struck from the record. you can’t.

oct 7
I 😭 love 😭 steely 😭 dan 😭

oct 15
anything they feel from reading me is a shadow cast by the higher dimension of my emotion. I can feel so much despair, it’s insane. it’s the source of whatever power it is that I have. I know how to pass through it without panicking, or crying for mommy, or digging my heels in while bleating like a pig headed for slaughter. “but it isn’t fair!”
of course it isn’t fair. your anger should be directed at those who made you believe the world was just and good--it isn’t, can’t be. so you accept this, breathe thru it, lift your head. “ok, now what?” —> you create your own world, that’s what. not thru biological reproduction but by making art. argue with the wall.

oct 17
you must become intimate with your own insanity if you want to escape a fate of projection, of making it everyone else’s problem, of being a bad time who everyone in your life winces at the sight of.

nov 19
I continue to project whatever I want onto whoever I choose. I don’t mind being the clown but catch me with the wig off and you better not ask me for: a photo a joke a balloon toy don’t ask me for nothin don’t even look at me. I remember too much from a world that doesn’t exist anymore. words fail, except maybe “prophecy” and “forgiveness.” I see the very notion of transhumanism used as nightmare fuel, and I agree it’s scary, sure. I’ve been terrorized by all this plenty of times. a meme maker we like posts something contrarian about someone else we like and I lay back on the couch, ask a. if he thinks the memer knows the alien is real, made of information, and distributed thru hyperspace. “that’s the hardest thing to accept,” I say, “that it’s already here and always has been.” all the certainty I once felt about men who hurt me when I was a girl, I feel now about this.

nov 22
size 12 low rise bootcut jeans. remarkable, the feeling of settling into the same shape I took in high school, wool sweater on top and flared denim on bottom. hair very long, very curly, no bangs. the tips of my brown leather clogs peek out from under the jeans just like the brown leather boots with red laces I wore back then. joy and relief at the sight of this self, along with a strong sense of surrender. I am offering her white flags and empty hands. I’m all yours, wild girl who schemes and keeps it all together. I remember laboring over a description that never made it into the book. “taming a tiger,” the labor of maintaining a bubble of story around her life. nothing I’m dealing with was my creation; everything started with her. she’s responsible and she knows it. meanwhile, I’m tired. I’m out of ideas. accepting the possibility it could be time for her to take over, I say ok let’s try it out. like I’m doing her a favor. as I hand over the reins, her eyes stay fixed on on the horizon, on something I can’t see.

nov 30
currently love being alive and that I get to have my own version of things. I want this to be the base level feeling and I think if I decide it is, it is. once I let myself feel good, I get glimpses of amazing stuff. the feeling of being the little worm in a warm feminine embrace. I feel a wall of sadness when I think about a little worm insisting upon its own existence. I open my eyes. I am feeling sorrow denial bargaining etc. I am choosing good even as I insist on something belonging only to myself. put on prospero’s books. it’s obscene, gluttonous, dripping wet, the best movie I’ve seen in my life. my sweatshirt is pulled way up, belly bare and arching. I’m fucking shakespeare and the television is the size of the whole world. I flail at the screen, at lines I wrote into a poem when I was nineteen. YOU TAUGHT ME LANGUAGE. it’s all very on the nose but in a way that feels reassuring. I can turn every interaction with any muse over in my palm until I see whatever I want. I’ll be your mirror, girlchild in the dark. the movie is decadent opulant repulsive rotting, the raw stuff of imagination rendered via pure human effort. I feel like the whole world is written in my head but I refuse to buy into the idea that those I love aren’t real so there is nothing to do but double back and do what’s for the best all the way down. nothing to do but write it down. I melt into the cat. I smoke weed until I feel rooted in the earth and vegetable brained. the alien is real and made of information and distributed through hyperspace the alien is real and made of information and distributed through hyperspace. we have crumbs of a mystery and a compulsion to strive, that’s it. I am so far out but still totally normal. I can fold anything into anything else and I have never not found a way out.

dec 2
what am I even interested in? representations of myself feel patronizing, like some cosmic grown-up dangling a toy (planets, stars, the fates, etc) over my bassinet. I’m over fear. I stare into my own left eye and will the pupil to turn to a slit, a cat’s eye. why would I be thrilled by a rendering of myself when said “self” can morph that easily? I added strawberry fields to the katie playlist because nothing is real, not even strawberries. they’re a false fruit. and this life is a dream. blah blah blah, it’s the same shit people have been saying forever.

dec 9
it takes me forever to notice the obvious reading, but when I do. oh boy, when I do.

dec 14
I developed my voice through so many years of isolation. are you isolated? have you ever been isolated? if not, you might be in trouble, especially if you read too much of me. you need a strong voice to combat mine, to battle this virus. my voice will take over, you see. it’s just what it does when confronted with a weaker one. my voice will eat your entire soul from the inside out if you aren’t careful. and at the end of it, you’ll be thrown out. I won’t admit ever having known you, let alone that I once cared about you. there’s no tenderness in the kill or be killed realm. you best be aware when you’ve crossed over into it.

dec 15
the cruelty I’m capable of is insane, and always dormant. do not believe for a second you are safe. anyone who’s ever known me would probably corroborate.

dec 20
if I turn someone into a character, that’s it. they’re dead. they are dead and I killed them. how can I live with myself? must be the monster of all monsters for the way I relish calamity, for how at peace I am by the thought of cycling thru destruction for eternity. whatever price is required, I’ve accepted–except the glowing red ember, the little worm. that still belongs only to me.

dec 24
drunk on the elixir of exposure. I visualize how many heads I exist in and the scene is impressive, very vast, but the better drug is imagining a single head, a specific one, the perfect reader housing me, sheltering me, treasuring me, hating me, cursing me. any psychic energy the perfect reader expends in my direction is more of a win than I ever thought I’d get. it’s so easy to accept that I deserve none of this–the bad, the good.