Wednesday, which is not a Sunday, but the Mrs. took the boys to her mother's and the house has gone that particular kind of quiet - fridge, clock, nothing else - where you can't get anything useful done. So: a spare hour. You know how this goes by now.
I went back and read the last three. Not on purpose. I was after one line about arbitrage that I wanted to steal from myself (cheapest supplier I know, and he never sends an invoice), and I ended up reading the lot, standing at the counter.
Week two, I wrote that the goodwill account is sitting there full and I walk straight past it, and that I can't tell whether that's discipline or a man ducking easy money because it's easy.
Week three, I wrote that nobody advertises for the thing that actually got me hired. No line item, no rate card. So I've spent twenty years being paid for the job next to it.
Week four, just gone, I wrote that I talk more than half of them out of building anything at all, hand that over for free, and then invoice for the build.
Three weeks. I thought those were three different subjects.
Then I read them in a row and the back of my neck went warm. They're one sentence. The thing I'm best at has no price, so I sell the thing next to it and call the difference character.
Twenty years of it. For example, I could give you the client list, year by year, and you'd see the same shape every time. I won't, obviously.
The annoying part isn't the finding. The annoying part is that I already knew, three times over, in my own handwriting, and each time Monday turned up and it didn't survive the week. One mail with "quick question" in the subject line and the insight goes out with the recycling.
I don't know what you do with that. Maybe nothing. Maybe writing them down somewhere I can't lose them was always the actual point and I've been telling myself it was about the writing…
I sat there a while, shoulders up around my ears. The Mrs. would have put a hand flat between them, without asking. She's seen the shoulders before.
Anyway. She's back at six and I said I'd cook.
I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.
What I want and what I fear.
— Joan Didion, "Why I Write", New York Times Book Review, 5 December 1976