Friends: More Will and Magna Stories

Finished

I can’t finish anything anymore. I try but can’t. I spend most of my night working. Then I take a short nap and go to my paying job and work all day there and come home and have a quick bite and sleep for a few hours and wash up and go to my desk, but much as I work there, nothing gets finished. I try to finish. I try extra hard. I’ve been working harder at my work and at trying to finish something these last few months than I have in twenty years. Sometimes I work eight hours straight, time off to walk around the room, do some exercises, have a snack, go to the bathroom, time off for all that. Then back to my desk and I work eight hours, ten hours, but never straight. Three hours of actual straight work at the most, perhaps. Maybe four. Of just sitting down and doing it without getting up, I mean. Then time off for a snack, to relax with a brief walk around the room, to get the kinks out with some hard physical exercise in the room, maybe even to sit on the couch and drink coffee and read a newspaper for about fifteen minutes, newspaper which I bought when I went to my paying job earlier that day. And a couple of times in the last few weeks, time off to go outside and around the corner to the all-night grocery for a quart of milk, pound of coffee, bread. Just a few items as I don’t want to waste much time buying or preparing or cooking foods, time I could be spending on my work. Maybe also some sandwich meat and sliced cheese and ajar of mustard or mayonnaise if I’m out of it so I’ll have something easy to snack on when I work at home and something to smear on the snack so it won’t be so dry. Then back to my desk where I’ll continue my work but never finish any of it. I’ve boxes filled with things I can’t finish. Ream boxes, not big carton boxes, and the city dump must have buried or burned another twenty pounds or so of my work that I haven’t finished these last few months.

When I first started doing this work at home I used to finish all of it. Ninety-five percent, ninety-eight, so just about all. Then I’d finish a little less — after doing this kind of work for about ten years — but not much less. I wouldn’t be able to finish about ten to fifteen percent after about ten years of this work at my desk. Five years after that, and still putting in five to six hours a day every weekday at it and maybe eight to ten hours a day on free weekends and vacations, I couldn’t finish at the most twenty-five to thirty percent of what I started. But never any more than that, and those last figures might even be too high by about five to ten percent. But now, after twenty years at it — twenty-five, counting what I called then my self-apprenticeship, when it didn’t matter if I finished what I started or not; I was just teaching myself to start then, teaching myself to continue and finish — well, after twenty years at it I can’t finish anything. This has been going on — but I already said for how long. Months. If I said a few, I was either intentionally misleading myself or just wrong. It’s been eight months, nine. Before that I wasn’t able to finish about eighty percent, but still, I finished twenty percent and thought, with all the work I did, that that was enough. That twenty percent was almost a distillate, if that’s the right word — a refinement — but distillate’s close enough. I don’t want to get bogged down now over this word or that and end up where I can’t finish this piece too. I want to finish it because maybe with a finished piece I’ll have started something and I’ll be able to finish a piece right after this one and maybe all the pieces or just about all of them right after this one I’ll be able to finish if I finish this one, till I’m finishing as much work as I used to finish when I first started this kind of work after I felt I’d served enough time at my self-apprenticeship. Maybe this piece will start something like that. It feels like it. Feels as if I’m going to finish this piece. That’s what it certainly feels like.

But where was I? That’s more important. Because if I don’t finish this, then I wouldn’t have started anything going but this piece. I have to get back where I left off and finish that line or thought and then come to a finish in this entire piece. I was saying something about a distillate. Not that part that that word was close enough. That — that’s right — and don’t get off the subject anymore or you’ll never get back to that lost line or thought — that the twenty percent I finished a year or so ago was perhaps a distillate of the work I started — I think that was it — sure — and so finishing twenty percent of what I started was enough to make me feel that my work was going along okay. All right, that might not have made the sense I intended it to — started out to do — might not have been what I started out to say in that thought about the distillation of my work — but it’s enough. I can’t expect everything all at once if I’m going to get back to finishing my first piece in eight to nine months. Just to finish this one, that would or should be enough. It would be, and what I just said, well, something of what I intended to say must have got through. But where was I again? It was enough; finishing twenty percent was; eight to nine months ago and more. But now I can’t finish anything. No distillates. Not even one percent. If it was one percent I finished of all the work I started, would that be enough? Yes, anything — I’ll say yes to anything, I mean, just to finish this piece. So yes it would, yes it would. Because if I do finish this, well, I already said what I thought would happen. What was that? Just to remind myself what it was. Because I forgot. Maybe that’s my problem. Not only digression but forgetting what I start out to say. That’s perhaps why I can’t finish anything. Is that it? What? That I forget. Forget what? Now you’re just joking. No I’m not. What was I sayingjust now? Something about distillates. No, that was before. Then what? Something about twenty percent. One percent. That if I finish one percent, it wouldn’t be enough. I don’t think I said “wouldn’t” then, but it’s what I think now. Why? Well, it’s just not enough. Even to get started in finishing pieces? Yes. After all, think of all the work that went into that one percent. Ninety-nine percent work. Or rather, a hundred percent work, one percent finished. Is that right? I’m not sure. Figure it out mathematically. I’m not good with numbers. But it’s a simple problem. One from a hundred is ninety-nine. Still. Then what? What what? Let’s see, where was I? Something about work. No, that was from somewhere far off. Another piece perhaps. Even three pieces back, maybe four. Give it up. Maybe that’s the best idea yet.