GOODBYE EGO HELLO VOID
A new game
One night six of us were sitting around the round table in the window playing a word association board game. Twenty-five cards bearing a single noun (“balloon,” “radio”) are laid in a five-by-five grid. One person is the clue-giver, who has a secret key to the field of cards. The key is basically a map of which nouns must be guessed and which ones must be avoided, and the clue-giver’s job is to offer a single word that will make their teammates guess the right combination of cards. Critically, the clue is only one word, after which the clue-giver can’t say anything else or give any indication (through noises or facial expressions) of whether the guessers are on the right track.
The hardest part of this game is being the clue-giver and remaining ABSOLUTELY SILENT AND NEUTRAL while your teammates debate aloud what they think you meant by the clue. It goes:
“If the clue is “plastic” maybe “balloon” is what she wanted us to pick because balloons are made with a kind of plastic? Wait, is rubber plastic?”
It goes:
“Parades involve a “trombone” sometimes…?”
And so on. (This game is fun with poets.)
Anyway, this night in question, as we were all sitting around, Marty was bearing up poorly under the stress of having to hear how his clues were being interpreted. He kept making faces, which is cheating. Eventually, C began whispering to him quietly, as a reminder to remain expressionless: You’re a void. You’re a void. You’re a void.
“Very Buddhist,” Marty said, laughing.
“I guess it sort of is, loosely,” C said. “Goodbye ego, hello void.”
GOODBYE EGO HELLO VOID!! everyone shouted.
I’ve been fantasizing for a while about writing without a specific audience or predetermined form. So much of my writing life I’m working with a particular set of readers in my ear — whichever magazine editor I’m on assignment for, imagining what she likes, not to mention what her boss and her magazine’s readership expect — or the various grownups who make a habit of engaging actively with whatever I put into the public sphere: old family friends, the woman who babysat me when I was in kindergarten, every member of my partner’s beloved extended family. I love these people, and I’m fond of my editors, and so I want to live up to the expectations they have for me. Not just their expectations re: the quality of my work or its subjects, but their expectations of who I am and my general virtue and wants and sensibilities and trustworthiness. There’s a story I’ve been wanting to write for, like, ten years about a blowjob and a terracotta planter, and I cannot write this story. There’s a story I’ve been wanting to write for, like, eighteen years about ** ****** ****, and I definitely cannot write that story either.
Because of my pathological eldest-daughter desire to Do A Good Job in front of authority figures (parents, boss, grandma-in-law), I have kept the grandma (or student, or school administrator) in mind when I write. For years, all these little authority figures have been sitting on my shoulder, peeking at my drafts as I make them. I have habitually discarded ideas for writing that I thought “might not amount to much of anything” or might be “too strange” or “too small” or “not in my lane.”
There are a lot of problems with this creatively and probably psychologically but the biggest problem is that originally, writing felt interesting because it was the space in my life that afforded maximum privacy from the expectations of others, total freedom to do make something strange and small, or to sound ungracious or horny or in love or dysregulated or embarrassingly reverent or eggheaded. Writing afforded the ultimate say-anything try-anything potential. I could be blissfully unaccountable with a word doc. I could stop worrying in a word doc.
And then, once people started reading things I wrote, I couldn’t. Or I could, but I was too worried.
Was the tipping point the moment when a relative scolded me in the comments section of a now-defunct website where I described a woman’s gigantic breasts jiggling at the lip of her balconette bustier? Mean, she’d called the description. I don’t think it was. Jiggling breasts are hot! But also: sometimes I am mean! And also also, I don’t want people to think I’m mean! I don’t want people who have known me since before I could dress myself to be regretful of all the time and energy they spent teaching me to be a good person because what a waste since I turned out to be mean on the internet!
But sometimes writing should be mean. Writing should be everything people are, and people —not least my relative, by the way— are sometimes mean. Sometimes I am a dysregulated reverent egghead who doesn’t like to be told what to do, even by myself, even if I also want to Do A Good Job.
“Have you thought about writing fiction?” asked Lynn while I was ranting about this in her kitchen.
Maybe fiction is the solution to this problem. But mostly (or also) I want to write again as myself. Which requires less autosurveillance, less polish, and less ego. And more void. More chaos.
It is total chaos, the energy inside a person that turns into words, and then the way those words bounce and hurtle around the world, doing and meaning all these things the person never imagined. It’s like the game: You offer the clue “air,” thinking obviously this will get people to say the words “balloon” and “radio” but then you sit there silently for minutes realizing that for Josh “air” means, like, “open air” which suggests “parade” and “beach” and Sarah thinks it indicates “argument,” like “airing grievances.” There’s no end to it and not much control, is what I mean, and that’s the point. That’s what makes it a good game.
So here it is: the container for the game. It will be irregular. It will be notebook excerpts, tiny essays, fragments, voice memos, bad poems, minor tantrums, major tantrums, paeans, half-baked schemes, love letters to my friends, lists.
Hooray, yikes, here we go.
other things top of mind as of january 1, 2025
The way Robert Alvarez paints friendship:
This passage from Anne Truitt’s Turn:
I am fascinated by a balance of community and work that makes life comfortable in a way entirely new to me. Because they meet so frequently and regularly throughout the course of a day, Annelise’s friends weave among them a texture of interchange that includes the details of their lives, each only a few hours old so their communication is fresh from meeting to meeting. They discuss everything that they do, embroidering it all with the immediacy of their reactions. This leaves no time for misunderstanding to foliate. They are always busy explaining themselves to one another.
All of this, Jordan, yes! 🙌🏾 Bring on the void, bring on the chaos , we contain multitudes!