X: Twine

Good morning. Today is décadi, the 20th of Ventôse, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate le cordeau, a word that encompasses all manner of slender thread.

Let's take a moment – not too long, but long enough to properly start the job – to mourn the loss of our attention. Begin your recollection in a car, in your youth, with nothing but the window for entertainment. Recall the slipperiness of your thoughts as the world slid by, and the way some thread of thought would slowly, messily, inexorably unspool in your mind until the world was faded and gone and only your imagination existed, only your story mattered, only your inner self held the stage to dance and sing and rewind and perform again. Remember the way you'd rehearse a thought? The way it would move forward, halt, return to start, and move forward again, essentially unchanged but now cemented and the next time glazed and the next time painted with delicate care, each detail appropriately colored before the tale could advance past its previous terminal point, if it ever did?

There once was such a sense of discovery in each word while reading. There was only one way through the maze, and that was to follow the writer's string, hand-over-hand, as they led you deeper and deeper into their own thinking. Your mind would feel merged with theirs, but not as a single entity ... as a traveling companion, a bosom buddy arm-linked-in-arm would followed the yellow clay road of their quest. You would reach the end – of the novel, of the story, of the article, of the multi-volume paperback saga – and physically turn away from the text, from the block of pulp that contained it, to blink at the wall and wait for your self to resume operations.

Sometimes, your self did not come back the same at all. It had fallen in the mud in the writer's emotions. In time, this would come clean, but for now, how the sting of skinned knees burned! How the dry caked mud would itch on your skin! How the memory the made your reddened, lachrymose eyes burn!

What began as someone else's thread of thought had tied a knot around your mind, bound you to their heart – or, as only much later we might learn, to a facet of an interpretation of their heart which is of course unobtainable except through careful study and historical context and biographical knowledge and even then the nature of truth would sluice away all but the barest nuggets of fact which paled in comparison to the fire of the actual soul inside that unknown and unknowable writer – so that you, personally, felt seen and understood and even (a dirty little secret) like you had been the only one to really "get" the writer because you were, of course, the only other person in the world who would have these thoughts and would have written them the exact same way. (Your favorite author was only the envious person who got to your own feelings first.)

So now you're hungry and you gobble up more. First by this person, then by another, then by the truckload. You read and read and read...

...or whatever the form of art that arrested you: you listen and listen and listen; you watch and watch and watch; you stare and stare and stare; you mimic and mimic and mimic;...

until you've found the underneath patterns and the simplicity of the building blocks come clear to you. You try your own hand and find it ready. The writer is a long-forgotten figure now, blended and blurred into something more ethereal and diaphanous – a muse – as you rush to put your own string into your own labyrinth and invite others to follow. Come! Come see! Here in the center, do you see me? Do you see what I'm saying?

But the toil is endless. You find the romance of consumption is overwhelmed by the labor of construction. Touching souls becomes secondary to checking commas, pounding keys, erecting plot scaffolding, sketching plot lines, laying out carefully parsed chapters with their timed caesuras and tantalizing titles. You know where you're going – the promised land – but you find that the number of steps to get there taxes your legs, your mind, your blessed attention. Quality fights with quantity. Nobody wins.

Perhaps you're back in the car, staring out the window, rehearsing the one thought you committed to paper, endlessly weaving and unraveling and reweaving the same patch of tattered cloth. Attention folds back in on itself. It goes nowhere. You realize you're lacking any span of it at all. Instead, you go round and round and round the spindle, winding yourself into a neat and unremarkable ball of nothing.

I've been in so many writer's workshops, y'all. I've attended so many seminars and webinars. I've read so many books and guides and inspirational essay collections. They all say the same thing, these writers from the tops of their little mountains of words: to be a writer, just write; to be a good writer, just read.

The word "twine" is related to all the "two" words: twin, twain, twixt, twice, twist. How it applied itself to a piece of sturdy string is a mystery, but I can perhaps see it. You tie one thing to another, and they become as one. In this pastoral calendar, I can see this celebrating the grafting of fruit trees, twisting two species that mix twixt them their fruits.

When I was younger, all I wanted to do was write because I couldn't shake the romance of how a writer harmonizes with a reader, this twinning I've been yawning on and on about. The older I get, the less I care about "being a writer" and the more I care about rediscovering that mystical love of attention that brought me into contact with an author, a passing landscape, a world. There comes a time in life when you can easily declare, "I've seen it all!" And proceed from there to be ways-y and lazy and stolidly yourself as a stone.

Or you can continue to wrap yourself up in the world and let it muddy you, change you, bear within you a new fruit. The moment to mourn our loss of attention is done now. You've made it this far. Get out there. Be twine.

Today's card: 4 of hearts

Remember how, deep down, the best thing about this new group of lab friends for Enzo was the friends part, how excited he was (Jack of hearts) to finally belong? The biggest danger of dropping out to join this career opportunity isn't financial or reputational, but that it will toss his feelings of companionship and belonging back into a chaotic place. Be patient Enzo. Just enjoy being in the right place for right now. And that's the end of that tale. We'll start another one tomorrow!

Something fun: Paul Ray & the Cobras feat. Stevie Ray Vaughn (115min)

I lived in Austin for a time – a time before the current foment about the town – and I quickly had to take a crash course in Austin history for my job as an editor at the local magazine. One of the fastest ways in was a Saturday night DJ set on KUT radio (now KUTX) called "Twine Time" hosted by Paul Ray. It was jam-packed with local blues, outlaw country, hillbilly hollering, and old school rock-and-roll. It was appointment listening. Mr. Ray passed away seven years ago, but the slot lived on, and is currently spun by a friend of mine, Paul Carrubba. (We were in our own rock band at one point, but we didn't have a world-famous guitarist sit in with us for a multi-hour set – we barely scratched out an EP.) If you're ever in Austin on a Saturday night, tune up 98.9 on the FM and pay attention. The heartbeat of the city's music is still there beneath all the construction and traffic noise, I swear.