Slump
The creative slump where I have become a stupid-nothingburger.
I finished Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black yesterday. It’s a collection of stories and essays by Cookie Muller. She was, and still is, magic. The piece found me on a whim, a singular copy resting, discarded, in “New Arrivals.” It had already been on my radar by proxy some quasi–internet-it-girls, so I broke my spending sobriety and proceeded to become entangled by Mueller’s obnoxiously true tales. This woman did it all with the fervor of mid-century curiosity, queer sensibility, and heroin. A lotta heroin.
Cookie Mueller’s adventures are striking; her gangs’ spontaneity are a phenomenon of the times, thanks to the absence of a modern embarrassment complex. Moreso, I am taken by her style. She’s straight-up, cheeky, yet serious when need-be. She doesn’t drain situations with uninspired idioms or premonitions. It's weightless, and for that I’m envious.
Walking through Clear Water rescued me from a slump I had unknowingly been drowning in. Her stories make me want to read again, her written wit makes me want to create. Reading what, writing what in particular, I don’t know. But I’m here, doing this, incohesively. Words on the page (screen) that I don’t plan to copyedit…shame!
I’ve found that the season is greatly to blame for my slump. Summer sucks. It’s hot and sticky, and not in a fun way. Summer in Boston is extra slow for whatever reason, which is a really depressing observation when you consider that nothing cool has happened to this city since it took 25 years to put a highway underground. It’s pretty lame to begin with, and I fear without the four walls of academia to tantalize me, there’s little creative juice flowing. Or lust for much of anything, to be honest.
The last book I finished was back in May. It's a book so super-duper special that it helped kick my ass deep into this slump to begin with: Sophie Kemp’s Paradise Logic. What a stupid novel. It’s filled with levels of whimsy and wise-cracking patriarchal critique never before seen on the page. Kemp’s literary power took over and I vowed to never ever read again! For nothing could be as stimulating as a novel about a woman on a journey to become the best girlfriend ever and she’s also a waterpark advertisement model with this really pervy agent then she eventually meets a gambling-addicted snake and the aforementioned boyfriend is like a really bad dude but it’s also a commentary on relationships and sex and those feminist SATC-coded terms so it means something I PROMISE.
I’ve never been a great reader. In skill and quantity. I skip over words and begin to daydream at the mere sight of a long paragraph. It’s typically a battle of engrossment versus frustration, unfortunately. Though in my old age (twenty-one and three-and-a-half months), I’m convinced one of the few ways I can truly become sharper is by reading more. Any impressive words that I use, I’ve stolen from books, and I do plan to continue to woo with the art of linguistics. Despite this apparent enthusiasm, I do possess a duality where I am haphazardly undisciplined in whatever yearly Goodreads goal I set. If you care, I planned to read 17 books this year. I’ve read seven. Cue the tiny violins.
I will trudge forward. My next read is The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. I’ve seen the Sofia Coppola adaptation too many times to not have indulged in the source. I also plan to soon read Animal Farm, which I’ve been threatening for years now. I got a used copy that’s filled with some kid’s class annotations about all the symbolism and characterization that I predict will be half the fun of the experience. Hopefully the previous owner underlined some big words for me to learn.
As for my writing muscle, it’s been little exercised. My journal takes the brunt of it, though fuck if anyone ever bears witness to the violentries of those pages. There’s a larping aspect of journaling that I enjoy, like I’m a lost soul from a yesteryear, connecting with my divine feminine. It’s also great practice for your vocab and prose and smart stuff like that. Other than this emotional record keeping, emails to strangers, aggressive Letterboxd reviews, and ominous texts to my father have kind of been the extent of my writing game recently.
You know, I tried writing another one of these personal essays. It was about spreadsheets. First strike. Google says I started it on May 18 – the day after I finished Paradise Logic — and finally gave up on June 25. This essay will never see the light of Substack being that the most compelling part is when I quote Demi Lovato’s “Confident” in reference to my hyperbolic comfortability with Microsoft Excel. Obviously I’m pumping out some of the brightest work among Gen-Z’s most deplorable.
This is right here, yes, right here!, is the primary maneuver in an attempt to escape the slumpy quick sand. Low stakes prose for a low stakes bunch, my dear ol’ friends. I depart Boston in two weeks now, then commence my stint in Los Angeles for a handful of months. Maybe the creative spark will persist, maybe it’ll fan out at the fleeting consideration of a $20 smoothie. Rumination on and on, no answer will come of it. Who knows, with all this hypothetical reading and writing, maybe one day I can have a collection of stories of my own. Though, it’ll never be as dazzling as Cookie’s. No one is as cool as Cookie.
