I find myself lost more frequently in recent days. Which is a poor excuse for not posting here as often as I’d like. I’m in the midst of a tiring job hunt, mounting work frustrations, and laboring at a story collection that feels like all my writing hopes are pinned to (and yes, I recognize the overly dramatic nature of such a statement, but it’s honest nonetheless).
But this had me thinking of non sequiturs. One in particular: “It’s not what you want that makes you fat.” My mother used to say this to me when I was young, largely because her mother had said it to her. As a kid I laughed it off and now, as an adult with a taste for desserts and other unhealthy things like fast food, pizza, etc. I feel like I can definitively say that actually it is EXACTLY what I want that makes me fat.
Of course, that’s not the point. For some reason in the deep mire of exhaustion I was feeling the other night while finally putting all the stories for my collection into a manuscript, I started thinking about that phrase. “It’s not what you want that makes you fat.” I can’t explain why this seems to make some mysterious sense to me in terms of writing, but it does. And it made me wonder if anyone else out there has a non sequitur that comes to them in the practice of writing or any great authorly non sequiturs they’ve read.
Or maybe, finding sense in nonsense is just an early sign that I’m losing it.