some fragments, august 2025

cockroach thought

Some days I feel like I have no skin. Everything bothers me. Every sound makes me want to fly into a rage and every encounter makes me want to cry. This state of bewildered fury is surely what it was like to be a baby. However, I am not a baby. I am an adult, and part of adulthood is proper handling of one’s emotions.

I don’t really know how to handle it, though. Where does this extreme sensitivity even come from? What does it mean? When it’s here it’s overwhelming, when it’s gone it’s gone absolutely. My normal tricks don’t work. Some days I just wake up feeling like a ticking bomb and my priority becomes “don’t explode.” But the next day, and the next, and the next, I might feel nothing at all. Then sometimes I feel something unzip inside me and all this sadness comes out. It feels like all my organs are sliding out of my body. It’s better than the anger. I understand my own sadness.

It’s not as useful as feeling nothing.

Lately I find myself thinking about scabs and scar tissue. A scab one leaves alone. Scar tissue can be a source of significant pain that has to be addressed somehow. Is there something I need to leave alone, or is there something I need to do? I have this belief that the worse thing is to be complacent and yet usually one ought to leave things alone. But what if this time is the exception? You never know. I’m very taken with one result I keep getting from doing the I Ching when I’m bored—“biting through.” Bite through, bite through, bite through.

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I have been thinking about a certain type of character, the woman who won’t die. She is usually somebody who is at least half bad, and sometimes more like 98% bad. In order of ascending badness, one list would probably go: Becky Sharp, Undine Spragg, and (we’re getting to that 98%) Scarlett O’Hara.

It matters (I think) that the women really are (at best) half bad, even if the implicit assumption might be that women who don’t die are usually carried through their travails by something other than virtue.¹ They are not fake bad, “good for her” bad, “it was justified self-defense” bad. They are also not like the noir femme fatales whose manipulative qualities are a way of surviving a world in which they are physically and financially dependent on people who are much stronger than they are. The women who don’t die really, really want to win, not just to get by. These women have a kind of cockroach heart that won’t even let them take the L.²

What makes Scarlett slightly different from Becky or Undine,³ and thus even less amenable to being cast in a softer light, is that her true viciousness consists in her adherence to the society she was raised in and not in her departures from it. Becky and Undine are playing a game they’re not “supposed” to know exists; Scarlett stamps her foot and says she was promised a life of ease at the top of unimaginable human suffering, dammit.⁴ She has to lose—not only because she did, in fact, lose, as a matter of historical fact, but because it’s morally imperative that she loses—and yet something about her story⁵ itself exists in ignorance of this fact.

Why am I thinking about all this, you well may ask…? One reason is that I’m going through some sort of bizarre period of synchronicity⁶ with Gone With The Wind, which keeps on coming up over and over in places it has no reason to be. For instance, the book shows up more in the letters of twentieth century science fiction writers than you might expect. (Well, okay, twice, but that’s still more than I expected.) Two people in totally separate conversations mentioned it to me on the same day.

The other is that I’ve begun to say to myself when confronted with any obstacle, like my own unstable feelings: I’ll outsell you. I think this stupid little mantra to myself even though I try to make a habit of not cultivating aspirations I cannot personally achieve. I’ll outsell you can only be accomplished through the actions of thousands of people I don’t know and can’t control, whereas I’ll write a good book rests within my sphere of control. Still, I think I’ll outsell you is my own inner cockroach talking. I am grateful to the cockroach. I need its drive.

Of course sometimes I’ll outsell you is mentally directed at something where sales are actually a relevant point of information, like the work of another person. In some ways this is a usefully impersonal way of funneling professional resentment (“my book can beat up your book”), but on the other hand I’d never invoke the category of sales against somebody I actually liked, so it’s not that impersonal. Reading through writers’ letters means reading thousands of words of professional resentment and it has to be said that professional resentment can make even very intelligent and otherwise insightful people act remarkably stupid.⁷ Usually, the stupidity amounts to blinding yourself to the virtues of whatever it is that you are currently resenting. Even if it’s good in some way you can’t deny… isn’t it suspicious, if they like it?⁸ (Though if they like you: aren’t you grand, to win even them over?)

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A big theme in Notes to John⁹ (to the extent that a book that is barely a “book” can have themes) is that Joan Didion¹⁰ had work as a way of getting through life and now she does not really have work anymore, but life remains. And she hates it. This year I’ve certainly realized that if I were deprived of my work I would irrevocably lose my mind. Basically every stupid and every smart thing I’ve ever done has had as its basic motivation to preserve my ability to work.

And then you think, but when I’m seventy, will I wish I’d thought of other things to do? Maybe. But what am I supposed to do about that?

1. There is at least one heroine I can think of who achieves this same kind of doggedness through sheer iron virtue (Jane Eyre), but she is eventually rewarded with a happy ending and a contrite husband who is punished exactly the right amount, so her not dying no longer feels like stubbornness at that point.

2. Also, this is why Sofia Coppola’s movie of Custom of the Country movie would have been bad. Wrong feminine type. But I still wanted to see it.

3. Neither here nor there but in a world in which Gone With The Wind was either less racist or the rest of us were more I think we would have gotten a Taylor song about Scarlett to go with “the last great american dynasty” and “The Bolter.” It’s obviously a character type that appeals to her. Maybe we’ll get an Undine Spragg song, we can only hope.

However—adjusting my “racism” dial back to 1975—we do have a Joni song:

4. But I haven’t actually read Gone With The Wind.

5. The movie, anyway (which I probably haven’t seen in twenty years).

6. Can one use “synchronicity” in this way?

7. I’m going to get so much use out of this image I feel.

8. As far as writing careers go, I am mostly convinced that there are, in most cases, only two answers to why them and not me and the answers are (1) who knows and (2) they publish more. Buried in (2) are all sorts of reasons why somebody might be able to publish more, which might cause unavoidable resentment in a general way (“if my married friends don’t stop telling me to quit my job and write full time I’ll scream”), but which are almost definitely not worth resenting in a personal way.

Now if you ran over somebody’s dog with your car on purpose and then laughed as they cried and that person turned out to be a publishing executive, you might have a different reason for not getting career breaks on your hands. But that’s not most people and you probably wouldn’t even be asking yourself why them and not me. You’d be asking yourself why didn’t I pick a different dog, probably (you are a bad person).

9. Previously.

10. Who is the ghost haunting my newsletter this year I guess. She could have brought me some Celine.