Notebooking a Novel

The question is: For someone like myself who writes and takes notes in a very patchworky, stream of consciousness, throw-paint-on-a-canvas-until-the-drips-hint-at-forms sort of way, how do I provide notebook excerpts that have any interest or meaning to a viewer? In theory, the same way as any of these notebook excerpts: by providing context. But how do you provide context for an entire novel? I'm not sure. So let's just jump right in.

These are as raw as they come. In no particular order, little scenes, images, descriptions and lines that will help for a novel-in-progress about a scientist who discovers the end of time.

The music, he determined after repeated but disparate listenings, had an odd ability to sound like it had been playing for many minutes when it had begun only seconds ago. It took only a single refrain of its funky 4/4 beat to sound like a record on repeat. To feel that the same backup singers were humming and bopping now for three songs length. That so much empty time had passed below your nose. At first this could be considered pleasant, until you also noted that the time felt empty, stagnant, wasted - though assuredly it was not as it was illusory - and that fear and disgust, that reminder of true lost time made you want to never hear it again, made you push past the track before its mere 2 min completion and allow yourself to succumb to an almost abject joy in the cessation of that voodoo rhythm.

"Stop and talk with me a minute," said Dora. Raymond removed his headphones and faced her, on the porch, half in the sun on a green plastic chair, her wrinkled dark skin, her wet and sagging eyes. Her bright orange and red African gown, her puffy white beanie. She was groaning again, that deep guttural groan. "I feel sick again," she said, holding her belly and rocking in a chair that doesn't rock. Finally, he asked. "Is it in the cheat?" "Yeah, sometimes." "What is it? Something chronic? You're a nurse, what is it?" "Yeah, I'm an RN. It's nerves," she said. He waited for more. "We had a death in the family, did I tell you?" She had. "Oh I prolly told you tens of times," she said. "No, just once," he said, though she had, and though he never knew what she meant. "When did it happen?" "Oh just a few weeks ago. Days ago." It had been weeks. "Who was it?" "My husband. Yessir, my husband." "Oh," he said. "So it's an anxiety, isn't it?" "Yeah," she said, rocking. She hack-burped again. Hyeacht, hyeacht. "But we're all set to go one o these days, so I'll get over it," she said. He'd thought she had a stomach tumor or something. He'd thought she was really sick. She was. Lonesome sick. "And my car's broke. Otherwise when I get depressed I can just get in the car and drive down San Pablo," she said. The thought of her driving scared him. "Just to drive?" "Yeah to keep moving, take my mind away." She looked off into the street and he commanded her to feel better when he returned at the end of the day, then waved, about to turn away. "Pray for me," she said, and he said "I will. I don't usually but I will for you," which he half meant. He meant that she was the only one he'd ever lied to like that. Anyone else would get an argument about petitioning a god. This lie was for her to believe. Her face became somehow more graven and serious. She pushed her face into the sun. "You should pray more," she said. "You're a healthy young good looking man, God's been good to you." "I've been blessed," he said. "There's the word, she said, her teeth gleaming, the wrinkles around her mouth pulled taut, her hands reaching over her head and coming together in a punctuated clap.
"Everyone's been so nice. I hope I'm not a bother," she said. He thought about his lab and his meeting and said no. "Did you and your husband have a good relationship?" "Oh yes, oh yes. We married young. I married into an educated family, I finished high school, then college. We had an educated family. I became an RN. We had ourselves an educated family. This side of Raymond's block could seem so different, but was it? Socioeconomic divisions happened along such seemingly arbitrary lines, but there was probably something behind it, something historical if you took the time to dig it up. Some struggle, some demarcation, some loss or some small victory of one self-identifying people against another, possibly long forgotten. "Dora," he said, and then again, "Dora," reminding her that he knew her name. Ten hours later, dusk saturating the sky, Raymond almost walked right Dora's house on his way back home from the lab. His headphones were on, yet he heard a voice and his feet stopped on their own. He looked up to her porch. "Excuse me sir," she said, "Do you have the time?"

She had forgotten what all the construction equipment was once used for, how it rolled and bleeped and stunk and rebuilt the earth over and over. Every time she heard Velcro tear she looked back with pink eyelids an puffy wide fish eyes, mouth open, autonomic.

Oh the way fractional-freeze-tempered glass fractures and sprays on the sidewalk, a golden spiral of sharp splines and splinters, the poor shadow of a crystal from an interlocking whole. You could tell the old from the new, the staircase of smoke grey cubes from these newer cells that became so transparent and prismal that you doubted they could ever have hidden such mysteries when unshattered.

It was a golden age of personal transportation devices the likes of which China and Indinesia never achieved. Not only did we have technology and the green apples of capitalism wasting away, but we had that meager hatred of other people to fuel our ingenuity, and a pop culture lust, its flip side, to help it go viral around every streetlight packed with honking cars, every public bus weighted down and sluggish with squawking and desperately bored announcers, every carpool turned into a shark tank of discontentnent and conflicting plans. Paired or group travel could feel like a festering outhouse when the whim of shifting schedules slithered like gray smoke into windows. What if you got the call from the dry cleaner that your gray blazer was all sewed up? What if your meeting time changed because someone was late? Were you just going to wait for them? What if the fancy of a hot dog suddenly arose in your gullet. Were you going to just travel with your group to some Ethiopian restaurant just because of the rule of precedent and majority? Get on your cycle. Pull the stopper off your wheels and your blades. Pump up your hydraulic stilts. Crank on the motorbike, pull your open faced helmet from the little wire rack on your pink scooter. Hop in a rickshaw, a tricked out tricycle, throw a motor on that old wooden pull wagon. Bring to boil the camping kettle on that miniature makeshift dirigible. Rip the cord on that backpack fan. Canoes and rowboats and single sail sunfish never had it so good. You've got places to go and you don't have to wait for any damn fucker.

Music is a tool for synchronizing people in time, and that became apparent when tambourine man entered the crowd, clapping and humming in front of the caterpillar of a band with the might of lights and lo fi amps strapped to their backpacks. The crowd parted for the caterpillar band. The speaker cones doubled as lights, craning up and over the crowd on movable necks, six little craning heads looking and talking at you. The crowd sung the crescendo and oh the eruption when the band snuck back onstage and thundered in with bass drum and fuzz and thump. Days passed in rapture.

She practiced her ballet in the bar, off-hours while O'Malley wiped up. She was sylphid, her satin pointe shoes dancing around beer spills and vomit.

"They all have groin and buttock injuries. From skating. From fucking. From lying. From telling the truth. From high stepping over pigeons and pigeon shit and checkerboards of rotting slugskin. And from abusing them organs too." He scratched his nose. "I can live in 12 dimensions simultaneously in this book," he said.

"Spare some change?" said Joe, putting out his calloused hands. Raymond laughed and slipped his own hand onto Joe's, shaking it as he passed, not breaking his stride. "Friendship eh? Something money can't buy." Joe laughed. Everything about him was gray and made from fabrics sold at gas stations and cheap dept stores.

Two men rolling an old stove across the street. A cultural decision to focus on inquiry toward the meaning of life. We are missing our story.

While reading what he had typed he reached for his glass and shook with reflex on account of a buzz on his fingertips. A fly paced along the rim of his homemade margarita. Its back shone a dragonfly green iridescent and lovely and its wings beat in spurts but it didn't lift off. Raymond watched it. It looked hurt, unable to fly. It crawled down the side of his glass, through the condensation, and then slid and tumbled to his desk, righted itself, buzzed its wings and hopped a few steps. It continued in circles, buzzing every couple seconds, going nowhere. Raymond kept watching, letting an existential absence overtake him and focus his vision. The room shrank and the fly grew larger, closer, its iridescent back now turquoise and yellow and shining, the bands of color rolling along its exoskeleton as it passed through rays of streetlights outside the window. He wanted to nudge it, somehow without scaring it, to see if it really couldn't fly or if it was just drunk or crazy. When it walked to the edge of the desk it just fell off, straight down to the carpet, and lay on it's side, wings beating again every half second, sounding out the buzz, buzz, buzz, shaking the fly but not lifting her. Raymond moved his chair out, bent down, and drew the fly onto his palm with his thumb, trying not to flinch and injure it when its buzz tickled the pads of his skin and triggered his reflexes. He placed her back on his desk. The fly righted itself. It stood. It massaged its front feet, rubbed its antennae, and stood.

Why do I always sit next to people who cough and hack and sound like disease has overtaken their lungs? Young and old. Perhaps it was all the cigarettes. Or was the air drying? Or was there a real sickness about to spread. Or perhaps they'd always been this way but he hadn't noticed. The man in the low white hat covered his mouth and faced the window, his lungs and throat revving up with a wheeze and then coughing again. Raymond didn't want to be in the same world as these people, but these were the people he wanted to record. Their trials and the absurdities of their oppression.

Raymond's head was down, scribbling notes on a folded notebook page, when he came to his usual escalator up, but when he stepped onto it the world felt like it lurched with vertigo, felt like a wind had pulled through him and confused his stomach and liver. It wasn't moving. That wind was born of expectation only. His mind had expected movement beneath his feet, to be swept forward and up and he would not have even registered the sensation, would have just continued scribbling had it worked. But still, his mind delivered the sensation of expected movement, but it was now non-synchronous with the sight of brushed aluminum walls and the rolling churning metal teeth below him, or the light above getting closer. Standing still on that first step, with his mind's sensation of movement, and he experienced that non-synchronocity. He experienced it as a wind pushing him in the opposite direction that he expected. For that moment he felt himself sinking backwards and down, down an escalator taking him the wrong way, the way of sickness, the way of illusion, that sense that the world only conforms to your expectations by chance and repetitive serendipity, but underneath, underneath it all is a hell that you will never know, and which contains all the truths that you are blind to, all the faces of your fellow men, all the physical laws that are not laws at all but temporary coincidences, all the solid moving stairways that we notice only when they refuse to take us to where we want to go.

The first man, that was him. The first man who tried to run. The first one. The one who they made an example out of. Amazing it took the hundredth expiree to try, more amazing that he lasted an entire season. The outcry Raymond expected and which everyone prepared for was negligible. Perhaps it was the luck of the draw, that it happened during the largest weekend of expirations yet in a localized township. The cops poked their heads in every passing sedan and bus and truck. Neighbors picked up pitchforks, actual pitchforks, just to look the part.

Joseph's research had all the fierceness of his brother's, but missed that thing that directs us to the righteous over the self-righteous. His hiccups were a curse, a twenty year torment driving his science and students, but you cannot get out of hell by studying its fire alone.

In the rain with the swell of a prerecorded orchestra greeting you from the subway and a live trumpet, and you wondering why or how the city smells like an ashtray, pungent and stale, but within fifteen seconds it's gone, not because it's really gone, but because you're used to it. Your very nerves have changed, attenuated to a new baseline, a new normal, in just a few seconds you have lost the ability to sense something because you've changed. How many of these sensations do we have control over and how many are we doomed to be helplessly unaware of? Sentimentality and humanity misdefined and hidden by the tools of evolution and adaptability, the very things that make us survive. Raymond walked past an empty bench. A kid's baseball mitt, black with grass stained baseball, sat palm up, leather strings facing the back of the bench. He sat down beside it.

He went down down down into the sewers to take a break from the rest of the humans. To talk only of the inky today with rats and minnows frogs and snakes and a million arthropods.

"We don't read anymore. But we finally figured out to jerk off with bacon grease," said the doctor, pacing from wall to wall. Silver flames flickered on his glasses toward cases and cases of wall-mounted revolvers.