There’s a strong hunch coming through across these two entries about the when of writing. The hypothesis: the end of the day is the place to brain dump. But after a year of pandemic, and after a New Year’s Eve day spent “traveling” with my kids and my in-laws “around the world” (virtually) following 2021, I’m not sure the exhaustion of a day can always (or ever) stand up to the recording of that day’s events. Here I am on the next morning describing the full day that was: We started in the morning in Australia and New Zealand, then moved continually west through food and drink and movies and music and activities and traditions and games to Japan and Indonesia and Thailand, to Bangladesh and Dubai and Kenya and Madagascar and India, to Istanbul and Moscow and France and Spain and England (including Hogwarts), onto Zoom for 12 minutes with Scout and Baby Aye, then back on tour, for stops in Brazil and Argentina and Chile and then, finally, to New York and Houston. It was exhausting. That ball, it kept moving until it dropped.

The way I think of the (writing) ball as moving is from one day to the next. As if having a clean slate is the key to hitting the ground running. (Cliche pile-up). And that’s, of course, crucial. But how does the ball move within a day? How is it kept up as the narrator moves from one writer’s thought to the next? How does the thought move without the ball?

One answer to those questions is a description of a problem, of how the when gets used. I seem to have gotten a little lost there in terms of work habits and work product. I don’t get beyond the diary, I don’t make my way from internal interior private nonfiction writing to something more literary or lyric or just plain old public facing. So something I’m eager to try is not stopping to correct or think in the very informal writing (ie: diary) and just letting it rip. I think about when I was young, 14 and 15 and freshly arrived in Acton, before and just after the second operation. At that time, Jack Kerouac appealed to me on such a visceral level. Rereading him more recently, I wrote off the taste of that earlier self as simply immature, romantic, teenaged. I used to like Stone Temple Pilots, too, after all. But some of the other culture from that era–Nirvana, of course, but (differently) Pearl Jam–holds up. Why? It said something in some way that felt and still feels essential. And maybe what Kerouac did that’s still alive for me is his work captured a mind unashamed to move in its natural way.

That’s a big goal of mine, a big part of what it means to “move” intellectually both on the side of the provocation (the integrity of the motions in my own mind) and on the side of evocation (that is, the hope of those motions and their arrangements as naturally as possible to cause reactions and emotions on the part of the reader). I want to keep the ball moving but also to pass the rock.

So this year, that’s how I want to most use the clock: to pass the rock. To really do that, though, I need help. The original sentence was not in the imperative case, as it might appear from the title here. But this title is a plea, to whatever abstract it drives my creative work, and to whomever receives it. Please, help me keep the ball moving, not (just) from day to day but from the abstract it to me and from me to the concrete reader, to the subject of any imperative sentence: you, understood.

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