/lit/ - Literature

Sending a letter to someone, this is a small part of it (still a draft)
I got back in Eugene pretty late on Saturday and it’s been chilly ever since. But the sun is always poking through so I can always go to either the river or Skinner’s Butte to get a good view of everything. I’ve been busy with my health insurance, parking garage companies, the US passport renewal system, and getting license plates for my car up here the past few days. Everything decided to pile on at once as I was leaving San Diego and chased me up here. Just realized we both have sick new cars now that are black. We should start a drag racing gang. The city is rather empty and less people are here than I thought, so I was overjoyed to bump into my friend Drew the other day. He’s a unique character with his own long, strange story I’ll tell you about some other time; but he’s in a cheerful mood every time I see him. We became friends back in 2019 by meeting in the apartment’s hot tub within our first few days here (true love isn’t dead), and he brought some friends over the other night. Also ‘Death on the Installment Plan’ is on another one of it’s strange larks. The book sadly isn’t anywhere near its predecessor (‘Journey to the End of Night’) in terms of quality but sometimes one of its little side-plots gets intriguing for a bit. The main character is helping this bizarre inventor who rails against standardization and wants to get people in the early 1900s to build his personalizable kit automobiles themselves instead of buying them standardized from a factory. Despite being more cheap and efficient -he argues- this spells the death of creativity, individuality, and ingenuity in the medium. And he resolves to fight against it tooth and nail for as long as he can. I have to applaud such laudable behavior in all situations.

You’ve been in my mind a lot the last couple days. That evening felt super dreamlike to me and I honestly remember very little of what we said to each other that whole day. Like most dreams the act of clinging to the details of what we said to each other feels like attempting to hold water in cupped hands. It recedes little by little and disappears to almost nothing if I’m not attentive. Talking to you didn’t feel like a normal conversation. More like a figment of my imagination or a spirit showed me something when I was in a state of altered consciousness, and now that I’ve come back to earth again large swathes of it are difficult to recall.