This piece of writing occurs at the end of the notebook. It is very aware that in concluding this notebook it is finishing what is decided to be a necessary stage in the writing of a book (the notebook began before and encompassed a period of time that was the basis for the book that this writing is to be). It is the transition point between nothing and something. And for something to be something—in this case writing—it must be groomed, it must be tailored to fit the mold of things that it is supposed to be like. And so the notebook phase was ending, in the notebook, and the computer phase begins, on the computer.
The previous piece in the notebook was an argument for a (post-post-)feminist, hyper-compassionate (David Foster Wall-esque?) critical study of pop culture, specifically Courtney Love and an ultimately dissatisfying Chuck Klosterman essay.
The title of the writing in question that followed was THOUGHT FROM WALK HOME ABOUT WHAT I WANT TO DO IN ANALOGY:
and it reads as follows:
I guess the thought began when I thought about wine-making—something I do not pretend to understand—and the notion of traditional natural methods that ideally take the vintner's (and technology's) hand out of the process, expressing the truth of the grape and where it comes from.
So—how do I express the terroir of experience with the grapes of words, and in what barrels of what material does the truth juice develop and ultimately please and intoxicate the conossieur?! (In the notebook it reads "develop and get the conosieur [sic] drunk," in the interest of transparency).
An illustration of this analogy follows:
I don't want to get ahead of myself, but I believe something important is happening here—so important that I am going to change the now-silent record and empty my now-full bladder in order to commit full concentration to its transcription.
[I had let the record player fall silent and ignored my need to urinate for 15 odd minutes while enwrapped in my drawing]
Bocce Balling on the West Coast 2—Bocce for Blood has begun.
12/29/11 initiated a decision that I would keep a journal. And so I did. And therefore I had one—and I resolved to fill it—while en route to and in return from Seattle, thus making the trip all the more about re-visiting and writing, returning to something with words as a mediator.
Between January 6th and 21st—the time frame of Bocce Balling on the West Coast—there are three brief entries. This was a week after I had resolved to—and days after I had managed to successfully—write every day. There was no reason to write—I was doing, I was playing bocce, I was traveling, I was also playing frisbee golf and wall ball and Apples to Apples, I was walking in snow, I was prioritizing post cards, I was drinking, I was being driven, I was on an airplane, I was on trains, I was on buses, I was in zip cars, I was at a grocery store wine tasting, I was moving a dining room table shipped decades ago from Pennsylvania up three narrow flights of stairs with my brother, I was watching a hockey game, I was comparing pixillated penises on screens in a bar in Seattle, I was meeting a mother and son in Live Oak Park in Berkeley, the name of which I remembered because I deemed it one of the top five parks I had ever visited, and I was playing with them their first game of bocce (there are no bocce courts at the park, just to clarify), I was composing a spontaneous poetry cycle aboard and about the Coast Starlight train south from Seattle, I was watching kitsch cinema at a theater in Arcata, and then I was, awake first, making coffee when the doctor who has the same name as my friend who was hosting us, the doctor who was the landlord who lived in Alaska and was exercising the agreed upon term that he stay at the house for a week of fly-fishing, the doctor was declining to have any coffee before it was entirely brewed because coffee is about the balance between the rich flavors of the initial drip and the bitter hints that come at the end. The doctor told me he was out in a foreign country medically intervening for humanitarian purposes. He had been awake without more than two hours of sleep for two days. He had a moment to make coffee and was seriously anticipating it. Jamie came and hurriedly grabbed the pot and poured himself a cup before it had finished brewing. The doctor declared the pot ruined, was pissed off about the whole thing for the reasons mentioned earlier, and dumped the pot, spilling coffee onto and ruining the pants he was wearing, pants of which he was quite fond. The next day, he continued, Jamie was dead. A motorcycle accident. I never got to redo the last thing I said to him and I ruined my pants. There's a double lesson here. The doctor left the room and two others corroborated the truth of the account, that it had happened, they were on the floor, awaking to the value of patience.
What I mean to say is that the story has fermented into mythology in this notebook, and the self-conscious drive to fill it has bestowed its meaning; now, as I did a year ago, I will begin to write about the two-week span of adventure in January that defined itself with the idea of rolling balls toward an ever-expanding cluster of other balls. And then turning around and doing it in the other direction.
* * *
And with that the journal is over. I began to write bocce stories on my computer, bypassing pens, notebooks and handwriting. A few days ago I was desperately looking through all of my files, emails, blog posts for an account that I am sure that I had typed up about Doctor Bill and his story of coffee and patience. I checked all the computers I had used, all email accounts, all blogging accounts. Then I remembered I had yet to type it. It was written in the transition to technology, not yet able to be shared with millions with the click of the mouse.
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