Git Gud

First check out the Polin museum website, and when you get the time these are also worth reading through. 
In terms of trying to get good, I think I've been slacking recently. Sure, the pandemic has allowed me to read more, but that's not always the best, right?
Does that make sense? So, sure, my metronome is focused on things like what I did (chess etc etc) and on some level I can say I'm working my mind, but in all reality I'm just going with my own comfort food (and one that has a certain status of intellectual pursuits written all over... so status signaling), which I really don't like myself for doing.
So, in terms of what one needs to get done, well, I'll write and possibly rewrite that which the greats have written. Of course, I mean the likes of James Baldwin and others whom I really like. 
"Notes of a Native Son":

"On the 29th of July, in 1943, meh father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born. Over a month before this, while all our energies were concentrated in waiting for these events, there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots of the century. A few hours after my father's funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker's chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. On the morning of the 3rd of August, we drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass."

Beautiful start to this story that doesn't really speak to how powerful the coming words will be. 

"The day of my father's funeral had also been my nineteenth birthday. As we drove him to the graveyard, the spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent, and hatred were all around us. It seemed to me that God himself had devised, to mark my father's end, the most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas. And it seemed to me, too, that the violence which rose all about us as my father left the world had been devised as a corrective for the pride of his eldest son. I had declined to believe in the apocalypse which had been central to my father's vision; very well, life seemed to be saying, here is something that will certainly pass for an apocalypse until the real thing comes along. I had inclined to be contemptuous of my father for the conditions of his life, for the conditions of our lives. When his life ended I began to wonder about that life and also, in a new way, to be apprehensive about my own."

That's something, isn't it? I don't think that any of my writing achieves the same level of intensity. I wonder why that is? Do I need to dig deeper? I sense that I do, but I always try to pull back. I'll write more soon. Be safe out there. 

Enjoyed it? Share it via email, facebook, twitter, or one of the buttons below (or through some other method you prefer). Thank you! As always, here's the tip jar. paypal.me/nlowhim Throw some change in there & help cover the costs of running this thing. You can use paypal or a credit card.