Disorder in Detail

I worry too much. It is a genetic trait, I think. I suffer silently the way my father did, sitting in the early morning with coffee and Camels, shaking his head quietly as he thought over some cosmic disorder that appeared as a single, minute detail of his ordinary, singular life. But where else can we find The Cosmos but in the tiniest details? Have you read Sartre's "Being and Nothingness"? Of course not. If you have, it was a required text, and even then, you skimmed parts. Having it on your bookshelf doesn't count, either. I have it on mine. I don't care. I'd rather read the synopsis or some pop overview of it, something from a philosopher's series. My father didn't need Sartre to tell him. The fucking radiator was gone and a replacement cost too much and he should never have bought that car in the first place so now he would spend his day off taking one off a car at the junk yard and putting it on his car. Etc. That never happened, but you know what I mean.

I worry about the dumbest of things. This blog, for instance. It is still a small blog, but the number of people who come here and who come back continues to grow. But it is a hard blog to get into, to start, if you don't read from the oldest to the newest. If only I could extract the stories and set them in the correct order and have it linked so that people could easily start at the beginning. . . . Even if I could do that, it is a big chore. And who do I think I am, anyway? My friend CC told me to write what I wanted and not to worry whether it was good or if people liked it, and so I began. It was great advice. But then I had nothing. Now I have something and I want to keep it, invest in it, make it more. Something to lose, so to speak. The Curse.

Meanwhile, the other site I put up has catapulted. Quickly, it was getting almost as many hits a day as this one. I think some people put it on their Face Book pages and now I am getting lots of visitors. It is a nice site without challenge, an image of life as we might wish it to be. What lesson do I learn from that?

It is early. I am drinking coffee and shaking my head silently. No Camels, though.

Then there is Chekhov. Who wouldn't rather read Chekhov's stories than "Being and Nothingness"? There is the cosmos in detail. On my trip to NYC, I bought a book titled "How to Write Like Chekhov: Advice and Inspiration, Straight from His Own Letters and Work." How could I pass it up? Here is some of what I read last night.

"Everything I am writing at present bores me and leaves me indifferent, but everything that is still only in my head interests me, moves me, and excites me."

"To write a story you need five of six days, during which time you must be thinking about it every moment, otherwise you will never be able to frame good sentences. Before it reaches the page, every sentence must spend two days in the brain, lying perfectly still and putting on weight. It goes without saying, of course, that I am too lazy to mind my own rule, but I do recommend it. . . ."

"I am by nature cautious and suspicious; I am afraid to rush, and in general I am afraid to publish. I am always worrying that people will tire of me and I will turn into one of these ballast generators. . . who, like myself, 'had once inspired great hopes.'"

I picture Chekhov with a cup of tea and his pipe sitting in the early morning alone at the kitchen table, his head moving back and forth as he thinks about the disorder of the cosmos in detail.