Insomnia and High Fidelity

It's very late for me, but my body has decided that rather than sleep it'd like to stay up and read Nick Hornby and turn completely into a man. So now, of course, I will write like Nick Hornby for the next couple of weeks, because my writing personality is still in junior high, hanging on the fringes of the cool crowd, trying so desperately to fit in.

Does this happen to others? I imagine that it does not happen to those I consider better writers (nearly everyone?) but I know on some level of course it does. Maybe the problem is that in one night my reading material may zoom from Milton to, well, Hornby, and so my poor writer inside develops quite a split personality.

Or maybe it's that when it comes to writing I have always been more a fan of the trappings of the thing rather than the thing itself. When I was younger I spent hours trying to decide on a pen name only to abandon all my stories (endless iterations of the same ill-conceived fairy tale) after five paragraphs or so. I would invent characters and then have no idea what to do with them. I can't decide if I want to be Stephenson with his nerdly asides and his history and his sometimes irritating overwriting and his truly horrific sex scenes, or Milton, all snobbish and classical, or Bradbury with his elegant visual prose or Whitman with his unabashed sentences.

Fuck it. I am just like every other self-obsessed member of my generation. I am the successor of Dave Eggers, who is clever and really, really wants you the reader to know it, but is also kind of physically attractive. And to top it all off, my own innate sexism is hitting hard, because other than Emily Bronte and J.K Rowling, my shelf doesn't hold a lot of female authors. I think Kate Chopin should have stuck to short stories and written fewer of them, Emily Dickenson is too dense, Sylvia Plath wrote great poetry but had no clue about the line between "biography" and "novel" and Virginia Woolf is just weird.

I don't like female singing voices. Apparently I don't like female writers. I throw like a girl, I punch like a girl, I run like a girl. I am in a male-dominated field pursuing a male-dominated profession, and most of my daydreams are of kitchens with granite countertops and red mixers.

I write like a....person?

For Robs

you and me--
we go like

the teasing screaming night
and the sweet sleepy morning.

no need for words.