June 13, 2021

Went skating at the Sepulveda Dam yesterday. I arranged it, and it was so fucking hot. There was no shade. It was a miscalculation! Or rather, I wanted to get a day in before it turned real hot for the summer. I wanted to make sure everybody could find parking. I wanted to try to ensure that we didn't get tickets. So I boiled my friend's brains. It wasn't that fun. 

I've been picking at my scalp under my hair just above my neck. Also pushing down the tips of my fingernails. I get addicted to the small irritating pain of it. I also think it might be a sign that I'm a bit bored or anxious. I go through phases of giving myself small injuries. 

Last night I went to a friend's house. She's also a writer and I asked her what she thought of her own writing career trajectory. She said she feels embarrassed about not having made it any farther by this point.  She was a wunderkind, writing plays for her school and for the town when she was in high school. Getting written up in the paper for it. When she goes home, people will tell her they're surprised she doesn't have an Oscar yet. She swept the college writing contests. She graduated with a manuscript as her thesis. She was awarded funded trips to go to writers conferences. She thinks maybe it fell apart because she didn't want to cultivate a Twitter following. It was right around the time that was beginning to be important for getting taken seriously as a writer. 

She thinks maybe she hasn't worked hard enough. I asked her what that meant, and she said she could have stuck with a blog. She could have cultivated a Twitter following. She does write. She's working on a book now, and she goes to networking events, and she's always completing some project. Is the lesson here to not get too confident? There's not a lesson, except maybe to reassert that it's hard, takes a while, and doesn't always work out. Rarely works out. 

At the dam, a bird landed and flopped over to where Mitch was standing. It was trying to find some shade. It stopped under our folding chair. It might have been diseased. We gave it water. When we left we constructed a small shelter of trash to keep it shaded. I hope it lived, but I'm not going to go back to check.