daily

The author of Bird by Bird talks about keeping index cards with her at all times, to jot down anything she wants to remember: an image, a memory, a sentence. This seems useful for creating worlds based on substance of real thoughts/feelings, but I'm not too good at creating. I do like the idea of conscious recording, and in that vein I'm going to try to blog for half an hour every day. I used to save, but saving pushes things back and back until they're no longer retrievable. And really, it's the daily stuff I may never record in any other form. I never wanted to write a blog about what-I-did-today, but a detail stowed in the corner of what-I-did-today isn't so lackluster. Or, even if it is (because honestly my life is pretty boring) the beauty of an index card is that it's not snobby about its content.

When I was in Vietnam, I wrote an email to M describing my uncle's house, and the strong senses associated with it that I'd forgotten. One was how the bathroom smelled like bugs, and he asked how could that be, what do bugs smell like. I said that he'd have to smell it to understand, mostly because I wasn't really sure what the smell was or how I knew it was the smell of bugs, but I was sure. Yesterday the wife says to me, why do we have moths in our kitchen (well, at first I thought she said "mops")? I hadn't seen any moths, but when I got closer to the sink, I smelled my uncle's bathroom. This tiny rectangle of space, smaller than a closet, that I frequented often at night because for some reason Vietnam gives me nocturia. And also, the smell of lots of rooms in Japan I'd been in. Moths! They're moths! How come I never actually see the moths? Is it because they have such short life-spans (this I learned from Virginia Woolf's Death of a Moth), or is it because they hide? I don't know, but I know their smell now.

Well, that took all of ten minutes.