The bathroom at store smells like granny smith apples. If there is one stable aspect of working here, it’s that the bathrooms will always smell like apples. One of my coworkers is utilizing one of the stalls. He’s telling me what he’s doing. I really don’t want to know he’s doing. But I can’t leave while I’m washing my hands. The soap even smells like apples. The mist from the diffusers not only clings to the surface of the black tiles and cardboard-thin walls, but somehow sinks in to everything, fading.
He asks me if I remember a time when he had long, black hair. I do. I ask him if he’s ever going to grow it back out again and dye it, because the blonde-going-on-gray is something I’m not used to from him. But he says no and explains to me that it’s too much maintenance. He continues on to tell me about his scalp. I don’t want to talk about his scalp, but he brought up an interesting point of beauty and I push the conversation a little more. Talking into the empty apple-scented room, I mention Darwinism, how hair maintenance equates to survival and survival ultimately equates to beauty. But he doesn’t want to hear about survival, especially not in the grocery store bathroom while we’re killing our lunch break, not even looking at each other. He just wants to talk about his scalp. Which is cool. At least we found some middle ground. Maybe this moment is something I could blog about later.
Blogging, as of right now, is the only writing that I’m currently sharing and exposing others too. I’m not in a workshop environment, I haven’t submitted anything serious in a while, and I don’t really pass around my stories (although, Captain Jack has been asking to see some work from me). So to give these little moments significance outside of myself, I turn to saving the anecdotes amongst my list of how many bananas the produce floor needs (which is always between two and four).
What do I blog about and why? Aside from obscurities, I can see three major topics that I subject any reader to. These include my employment at the grocery store, my role as a student enrolled in my current program, and major life issues articulated through the lens of either of the first two. I wonder if all of my writing consists of trying to settle internal conflicts through these pseudo-sociological roles.
When I’m writing a post, especially in the last few months, I try to consider things like merit, patterns, and focus. Earlier, I flipped through a folder I have on my computer’s desktop and looked at a bunch of unfinished blog posts. With my writing and most overlying issues in my life I tend to get overwhelmed with what I jump into and quit. Easily. I get apprehensive, and it’s not good for what Annie Dillard considers, ‘the flow.’ Polished writing will have its place. Maybe one of these days I’ll even finish this short story I started a month ago. Or maybe not. It’s not indifference, maybe it is a bit of me lacking discipline, but it’s more so me being okay with being the jeans-and-t-shirt-Andrew, the one who wrote blog posts before short stories and unfinished novels.
So as I sit here, drinking Guinness out of a New England Patriots mug that my uncle gave me as a birthday gift, I can look at this writer’s block and shrug. I can take a sip, pretending to be a Patriots fan, and give these patterns and moments of literary potential a mildly interested glance and say, “Whatev.”
I’m going to blog about stupid shit and enjoy it.
Stage Fright 