September 24, 2020
Feeling a bit lost today, and indulgent, and also feeling a free-floating anxiety. I made golden toast and layered it with strawberry jam. It was the no added sugar kind but the burst of natural sugars still pepped up body and spirit. I savoured every crunchy bite. I want to take a book and go sit by the sea and drink tea. I have two books on Libby from the library—Reading Turgenev by William Trevor and the New Wilderness by Diane Cook. I just finished Real Life by Brandon Taylor and don’t know if anything I read will match up to it for a while. After an initial resistance to the style I slipped into it and read it in one breath. The intensity still lingers.
I’m still trying to understand the Agri Bills, the aim and the resistance. Listening to an interview with P. Sainath I understood the layers of reason why farmers were protesting. I heard a horror story from Kerela where farmers were seduced by high prices to grow vanilla for export instead of a food crop and the price dropped drastically the following year. I also watched later another debate on the bills where it seemed that private players were already buying from farmers at their doorstep—and so didn't need the bill—and it wasn’t that hard to get a license to do so. Sainath also spoke of how this new bill allows stockpiling of essentials by traders and what that can do to prices. What the farmers only wanted was a minimum price guarantee for their produce, which of course the bill doesn’t provide. Why can’t that be put in? Why does the farmer just have to take the word of the PM? Another thing the bills do is legislate about what used to be a state subject, further reducing their powers. The current government does like monopolies of all kinds. I still wonder what the end-game of all this is.
Yesterday while the opposition had boycotted parliament, to protest the not allowing of discussion or division of vote for the Agri Bills, several bills (I think 15) were passed. Some about the controversial labour laws. Convenient. I feel let down by both the government and the opposition as they behave like irresponsible delinquents with huge egos and not like the public servants, and in an ideal world role models, they are supposed to be.
This morning I pulled out one of the first stories I had ever written, in 2012 when I first began this writing journey. It was about a man grappling with his wife’s transformation into a shape shifter. It was cute. I drew a time line of the writing journey, less than ten short stories mostly for courses I was in, two completed manuscripts and one draft. I saw that though I’ve been interrupted by life events before this is the first truly dry state I’ve been in. Frustrating. But am trying to get myself motivated to prepare one of the novels for self-publication—talking to an artist friend about cover design, having it edited etc. Also I signed up to work with a writing coach for the first time. Hope I can break through this dammed flow.
I had the morning free to work on my writing. I know sitting here eating toast and blogging is procrastination. I guess the only good thing about the way I procrastinate is that I write—journal or blog. Doing either is soothing. But, I should be staying with the uneasy frustration. I should be grappling with something more. I miss the places I used to go to, to help loosen the words when I was stuck—the libraries and the library café at the central library. Sigh
No comments:
Post a Comment