I’ve been thinking about this sudden kinship with the incarcerated that’s been thrust on the world. How inexperienced most of us are at “doing time.” How what we all need at the moment is what I generally advise guys through prison letters: to use the time, repurpose it. Turn your cell of useless warehousing and punishment into a monk’s cell, I suggest in letters. Transform it, like a molotov cocktail. It takes creativity, though, and patience to sit still, to “go inside” when we can’t “go outside.” To do the inner stuff we say we never have time for.

As for me, I’m getting closer to writing again.

To pump myself up I’ve begun reading The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr. Here’s a line that struck me this morning: “Writing has never been linear for me. I always circle my own stories, avoiding the truth like a pooch staked to a clothesline pole, spiraling closer and closer with each revision till—with each book—my false self finally lines up eye to eye with the true one.”

Looks like she’s read a little Merton.

But more so, it makes me think of your Tetherball Chimes, Murph, how the harder we try to swing away from our origins, the harder that momentum circles us back home—<quote-02>eventually<quote-02>.

I think now about the things I’ve avoided talking about—writing about—regarding my home, my parents, theology in general, about Lulo. Maybe I’ll write about that stuff here, just to you guys. How long are we going to do this, again?

For now I’ll pass the ball: Murph, say more about what you considered fashionable in my last entry, more about why you bristled when I named how <quote-03>neurotic<quote-03> we—Abram’s parents—were at the outset. Fashionable or not, I want to talk about our flaws with him. My parents weren’t so good at confessing their sins or taking responsibility, though they preached that last value very loudly. Nothing calms me more, endears me more to somebody, than hearing them name their most annoying traits, neither defending nor apologizing—<quote-04>just aware<quote-04>. I want Abram not to feel crazy around our small forms of crazy, to be able to name them as easily as I would the birds outside the window. To name something is to welcome it as part of our reality; it’s there and it has a name.

I wonder if quarantined families all across America—all across the world right now—will have to confront the realities they’ve been avoiding. Could be a season of revelations—or further denial.

I guess it depends on how long this all lasts.

March 27th

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<pull-quote>sugar cereal<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Weaponized conservative rhetoric is what this is.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>That's what our family called it and I stand with the genre name. Sugar cereal: as opposed to the standard or healthy kinds. Sugar cereal is indulgent, straight-up delights floating in a bowl.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>If sugar were people, you’d have sex with the ones your family employs for minimum wage at their morals factory then pass legislation making it harder for them to vote. You have some serious work to do with your attitude toward sugar.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>My attitude? I love not only sugar but especially sugar cereal! I'd take two bowls of Cinnamon Toast Crunch or Cocoa Pebbles over any dessert. Cake? Pie? No thanks, you got some Lucky Charms? That's my adoring attitude toward sugar cereal.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>All I’m saying is that if you examined the culture from which this term emerged, you’d no longer use it.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>I can't tell if you're being serious or not.<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>i hear your argument, murph, but i sense a sort of falstaffian, life-loving embrace of pleasure in hoke’s use of the term.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>I don’t disagree. Nor do I question his intent, just his unthinking use of a term he admits is inherited. I bet 99 out of 100 people who use the term “sugar cereal” are voting for Trump in November.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Fine. Change it to "candy cereal." Or some families call it "Saturday cereal." They all work for me. The point is to celebrate the special stuff that packs childhood joy.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>If you start calling it “candy cereal,” we aren’t friends anymore.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>eventually<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Even if you, Wuck, Conch, Kristen, and David Foster Wallace's agent's assistant are the only five people who will ever read TC in its entirety, I'll still feel a sense of pride each time you refer to it like a real book.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>It is a real book. A real work. Its publishing future is just an unfortunate wait for the time being.<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>yeah. it's great, bro.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>neurotic<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>You said how you were "fucked up," I think, not neurotic.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Tomato, tomahto?<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Well, "neurotic" Woody Allen is harmless and adorable. "Fucked up" Woody Allen...not so much.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>just aware<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>You and I are, like, pretty different, bud.<p-comment>
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