Can't You Just Make Something Up?

The cure for raccoon hand in a tin can

I don’t like to listen to anything when I run. I find it overstimulating, headphones don’t fit my special ears, and music of the appropriate tempo is a huge blind spot for me. Jock Rock only lasts 37 minutes and then what? P!nk? Flume? Are y’all all listening to Flume?

Sometimes I regret it. Sometimes I pass people in Prospect Park running with their eyes closed mouthing the words to some Flume song (?!), their entire right arm twitching to the beat drop, and I worry I’m missing out on the elation they’re feeling at the moment when “You & Me” goes “wah wah wah wah wah.” But as it is I cherish my analog jogs. It’s virtually the only time I spend unmediated, not looking at my phone or watching Saoirse Ronan interviews on YouTube or consuming the entire back-catalog of Mike Birbiglia’s podcast. I like to let my mind wander and watch where it goes, hoping it will uncover some yet inconceivable epiphany or at the very least just wear itself out.

When I’m in a good mood — well-rested with lots of clean socks and a good score on the day’s Wordle — this practice is harmless, even productive. I’ll itemize to-do lists, think of ideas for this newsletter, ways to get rich. Make slice-of-life style observations, the voice in my head talking like a wannabe Jerry Seinfeld: “What’s the deal with restaurant bathrooms? Why do half of them have a portrait of an old woman hanging above the toilet like she’s the restaurant grandmother? I know she didn’t make the roasted chicken! Don’t try to manipulate my pants are down!”

At my best I think at the tempo that I move, my thoughts fast and frenzied and multitudinous. But when I’ve been compromised, a grain of sand jamming the gears of the Snoopy wristwatch that is my psyche, the results are devastating. I don’t remember much of Where The Red Fern Grows — I know there are dogs, I’m sure they die because they always do — but I’ll never forget the raccoon traps. Billy puts something shiny in a tin can and makes a small opening at the mouth of the can with jagged barbs facing inwards. The raccoon sees the shiny thing and reaches in to grab it. When he tries to pull his hand-paw out, though, his fist is too wide to fit. He gets caught on the barbs, his little fingers still tightly grasped, and he’s doomed. Not knowing that he could run free if he just let go.

At my worst, that’s exactly how my brain works. Like a raccoon fist in a tin can. Not often, but certainly every time I get a weird text. Or have a bracing new crush. Or feel that I’ve been generally wronged. The fingers of my mind close on the reply, the things he said on our 2^nd date, the reasons why I actually did not deserve to be yelled at on the subway by that woman who ran into me with her tote bag, respectively, my thoughts forming a vice-like grip on a single subject. I can hear the hounds coming, but I can’t let go.

The shrill voice of some faceless, petty troll drowns out my Jerry Seinfeld impression. My to-dos become an endless, obsessive scroll, every bullet reading “seek revenge” (I literally didn’t move and her tote bag was hitting ME.) The beautiful triviality of my traditional thought patterns won’t stand up to the formidability of the new intruder, like a loud, obnoxious interloper filibustering the air time of my variety-show brain, farting into the microphone while my magicians and dance crews wait in the wings. When the events of my own life are this agitating, it’s then that grasp at something, anything beyond it. It’s then that I work to think in fiction.

This has been a new practice, one reliant on muscles that have atrophied for lack of use, no longer routinely stretched and activated by playing pretend. As such I find myself quivering under the weight of “think of something!” landing by default to one of two, well-trod ideations:

1. A punchy young blonde woman, not beautiful but not ugly, sits at the end of a long bar. We don’t know her name, but neither does she — she’s starting a new life as an au pair for a wealthy London family and she wants a new name to follow suit. (I conceived of this thread three years ago when I was detesting the job I would soon quit and was fantasizing about being an au pair with blond hair. The nameless thing I think stems from the fact that I can’t think of a single name for a female protagonist that I feel that I can pull off. Annie? Oh my god.)

2. A married couple of city mice named Nook and Cranny. Nook is contented by the typical routine of a mouse’s life — taking tiny bites of things, the perimeters of rooms — while Cranny yearns to transcend the bounds of her species to open a haberdashery full of tiny mouse hats.

Both of these offer me little runway. I can’t even find a name for the character in the first and the second is already untouchably perfect cannot be improved I am seeking illustrators. And I can’t think of anything else I want to think about. Where would I begin? Something about a girl? Hate all girl names apparently. Something about a boy? Nick Hornby did that already. Mice. Mice. Mice. Mice.

I cast out a net for a new story and reel in exactly what I am trying to avoid: things that have actually happened to me, a protagonist with the same problems that I have, side characters in the spitting image of my best friends, my exes, their aliases leaving them so thinly veiled you could still make out the colors of their eyes. I went looking for prompts online and found one really robust Reddit thread of a bunch that I hated. “You have no idea how this silly manchild is the greatest commander of your age, until now,” for example.

I saw Graham Norton speak at Rizzoli Books last month. After a long, perfect, ongoing career as a “chat” show host (British), he’s started a new phase of his life as a novelist. He told the room, eyes twinkling, he was grateful he hadn’t started any earlier. Young novelists, he said, seemed able only to write about themselves, cannibalizing their own lives for content ruthlessly. They’d release a killer debut, but the real test came with their sophomore title, he said. “When their second book is about a main character who’s just released a best-selling novel, that’s when you know.” I felt like he was looking at me when he said this. Through my skull and into my head at the main character seated at the end of the bar it was taking everything in me not to name “Kate.”

I told him I’d loved him forever and he said “that’s very nice.”

He talked about the seeds of his first book, sprung from a compulsion for building imagined lives for every person he passed on the street. I do a form of this all the time but even then I tend towards reality. Reading lips to ascertain what the fight’s about. Noting the country club logo on a woman’s baseball cap and imagining her summers there. (That is a fancy bag so they must be nice.) Men with grocery store bouquets are my favorite. He remembered his wife’s birthday just before he left the office, thank god. Or maybe she just found out she’s pregnant! I wonder how they met. I hope it’s a girl.

I got dinner with my brother Bairdie this week at an Uzbeki restaurant downtown. There was a live singer in the corner and the menus were on iPads. I asked Bairdie if he ever thought in fiction and he said of course he did. Then he told me the entire framework for a sci-fi novel about a teen mutant named Cleo and her fight against her high-school bully Esmerelda Éclair and her power-hungry family. He’s drawn pictures of the characters, too.

I couldn’t believe it. He made it look so easy. I asked him when he’d done this and he said just a random Tuesday night. My mouth hung wide open as the guy in the corner launched into a heavily accented rendition of “My Way.” I told Bairdie about my issue and he didn’t get it. “Just make something up.” I told him about how I couldn’t think of a good girl name. “What about Elaine.” Genius. Dammit. I walked him back to his hotel and told him about all about the woman who’d bumped into me on the subway.

Maybe it will take getting older. It absolutely will take getting over myself. But consider my second book in work. And if it’s a sequel where Nook and Cranny go on a cruise, keep walking.

Pony Recommends:

1. Re: Mike Birbiglia — having punched in for roughly 15 hours of his podcast Working It Out over the course of a long weekend, I watched his special The Old Man and the Pool. He walks out on stage holding a mug of tea and that’s how I felt the whole time. Warm and in good hands. And like I was at the funniest Moth show ever. It’s an amazing story and he’s wonderful storyteller and I can’t believe anyone could sleep walk that bad.

Julia’s eye for composition at work.

2. I just read Bob Dylan’s memoir and it knocked me right out (that’s totally how he would say that). Every two pages I’m delighted again and again by the words he uses to describe the world and the way he sees it. He says a million awesome things like “she was cool as pie, hip from head to toe, a Maltese kitten, a solid viper.” He describes seeing his girlfriend Suze Rotolo for the first time and says “the air was suddenly filled with banana leaves.” I’ve been listening to this song first thing in the morning every morning for a few weeks now, too.

3. Classical Current by Laurindo Almeida has made my life 15% better as of last Friday when my friend Louisa sent it to me. Its first song, “The Breeze and I” is my favorite. It sounds like taking a bike ride with flowers in your front basket and like sailing and like spinning around in a skirt.

4. This morning eating my pancakes I watched Amy Sedaris’s apartment tour for The Cut and it did not make me want a rabbit but it did make me want to pick Amy Sedaris up and hold her. There’s not one thing she did in that whole video that wasn’t funny and she has a lamp made out of hair samples she got from her wig place.

XO Kate