Words without meaning | More TK #1

Back in February, my girlfriend and I spent a lot of time in Goods for the Study, a stationary store in Greenwich Village. It was cold, and raining hard, and we were killing some time between a lunch date and an errand. Eventually, after what felt like an hour of debating and perusing, I walked out with a Tombow Mono drawing pen and this delightful little Midori Grain Memo notebook. Neither has really left my side since.

There are so many ways to evaluate pens and paper, and Goods for the Study has about a zillion of both. Writing—that is, to-the-page-with-ink writing—is one of the oldest and most persnickety things we do as people. Writing as a creative act, while mechanically identical, is even more complicated.

I want to be a writer, I think, or I want to at least be thought of as a writer. One of the things holding me up there is that I’ve always been absurdly feast-or-famine as a producer of written material. When I was a teenager, and full of teenager-y feelings, I was able to churn out a few dozen or hundred words in one go, mostly taking the form of malformed second-person fiction (I was, perhaps, overly influenced by a Selected Shorts recording of “It’s Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?” Jay McInerney’s 1982 Paris Review piece that eventually became Bright Lights, Big City, but who isn’t when they’re sixteen?) I never kept pace with my younger self, but as high school became college became my first job, I stayed close enough.

I think like a lot of people, the 2020 pandemic lockdowns killed my creative muscles stone dead. I became an incredibly passive consumer of art—I read only one book between October 2020 and January 2022. Writing was where the real world lived—cooped up at home, the only way I understood what was going on outside was from the words of others, and I took little pleasure in the reading. I instead filled my time with video games, or following the carefully laid film-consumption pathway of “Blank Check with Griffin and David,” among others. Art was not a thing I did anymore—it was pure cope.

I can’t really tell you when I picked up a pen after that, when writing became a thing I felt capable of doing again. But, after a while, ensconced in my journalism-adjacent job with my writer-adjacent partner in my graduate school program for doing words good meant being constantly buffeted by aching, beautiful, funny, informative prose.

It’s all envy, I suppose, this feeling that writing is something I should be able to do, and do regularly, and do well. Then again, I’m supposed to keep to a diet and exercise regimen, and that only ever lasts like three weeks. Maybe that’s why I’ve attached myself to the little Midori notebook, with its chintzy black leather cover and neat mix of lined and unlined pages. In some respects, I don’t think my attachment to this notebook differs much from budding music producers or filmmakers who are certain, certain, that, with the right piece of kit, some strange alchemy will beset them and complete their transformation into A Real Artist of sorts. I know this is a fallacy—the act of creation is what makes a creator, and yet I find myself carrying the notebook everywhere, and still not writing (except for, ironically, this piece). But, having the option to, at any moment, wander away from a party and tuck myself into a corner to fire off a few words about nothing in particular to nobody special makes writing feel less like something far outside my grasp. It’s right next to me. There’s the pen. There’s a chair by the window with plenty of light.

Take a minute. Let the words breathe.

more tk,

Luis

If you want to read some of my words about something, I wrote about New York City FC’s utter paucity of merch for The Outfield (my first for them, but not the last).