The Not-So-Terrible, Not-Exactly-Horrible, Kind of Good & Kind of Bad Day Off

I don't know whether today counts as a day off, exactly, since I've spent most of it writing like a maniac (and deleting like a maniac, too, but my essay did get longer by a page – single-spaced, I might add! – which means I must have written more than I deleted, right?)

However, on the off chance that someone out there is languishing due to lack of information on recent Tanya-related topics, I'll see if I have enough strength left in my wobbly wrists for a quick update.

Last Wednesday, I was stuck in a Black Donut Hole. Today, everything looks a little bit lighter – at least insofar as my current writing project is concerned. I may even finish it by the end of September, as planned, although that's probably being overly optimistic.

In other news, I read an article in the Willamette Week this morning that I don't even know what to do with. (With which I don't even know what to do, for all the preposition Nazis up with whom I sometimes find it hard to put. Aaaanyway....)

The article was about Tom Bissell (the name rang a tinkly little bell somewhere down the long hallway of memory when I first saw it on the WW cover), who happens to be, in Aaron Mesh's opinion, “Portland's finest writer.” So then it turns out that Bissell is the guy who wrote that article I read in Harper's way back in 2003, the one about the Aral Sea. Unless I'm mistaken, and there was more than one article on the Aral Sea in Harper's in 2003, which seems highly unlikely, not to say absurd, then Bissell wrote that sentence about the little Uzbeckistani kid with a head like a pumpkin, an image that has haunted me for years.

Then I find out that Bissell was born in 1974, which makes him exactly my age, and also that he was personally acquainted with David Foster Wallace, “the writer Bissell most obviously resembles.”

Continuing on with the uncanny coincidences, or at least what seemed like uncanny coincidences to me, “Two weeks ago, at Sellwood's former funeral home-turned-concert venue the Woods, Bissell stood on the small stage for the music and literature weekend This! Fest and read a story about a blowjob.”

Nope, I had nothing to do with the blowjob.

Here's the thing: I had fully intended to go to This! Fest. The Woods is within walking distance of my apartment, and the event was free, fer cripe's sake. I was dying to go. But Tyler had to work, which meant that I would have to have bribed my fourteen-year-old son to watch my three-year-old daughter (his usual fee is a jar of Nutella or a foot-long from Subway), walked up there, found somewhere to sit alone, tried not to feel like a complete dork among what I imagined would be a hip & savvy crowd of cronies for the one hour I might have at my disposal, sneaked out without offending whomever happened to be performing when my time was up, and walked back home in time to make dinner for everyone. So I didn't end up going after all.

There was something else in that article that really bothered me.

Bissell admits to having written almost all of his most recent book while he was under the influence of cocaine. So...okay, here we have another “relentlessly prolific” writer whose work I admire and whose habits I would not want to emulate.

But this is what really got me. After explaining that he “hopes” and “thinks” his substance-abuse “story” is “almost over” – WTF does he mean, almost?!? – Bissell says this: “I think the Grand Theft Auto chapter in Extra Lives is one of the best things I've ever written, and I would happily go through every drug-induced terror and self-mutilation to have written that piece. Seems to me like a very fair bargain.”

In some later entry, I'll probably say more about the Artist-as-Addict archetype, and the damage I think it does to those of us who feel driven to create art, in whatever form. But I think I've done enough writing for one day.