I was thinking of sleeping in the yard so I was chipping away at the ice with this little garden hoe. I got into that groove of associating thoughts with actions. I’d chip away at the ice and think about emailing Nathaniel Duggan, for example. Every day, more or less, I was chipping ice and thinking about emailing him. You know, I wake up and make breakfast, brew coffee, drink the coffee, and then experience anxiety. I tried a few different ways of writing that, but nothing sounds right. It’s just anxiety – it’s a feeling. It doesn’t wash over me, for example. I don’t know what that means. Every day things are fine, I think, but I’m usually convinced things aren’t fine, and it takes, like, an hour for that to happen. I broke the hoe and started using this little garden rake. It also broke – there was a lot of ice. Some places it was really thick. I could chip at thinner parts and pry up these big sheets and then throw them over the fence. My workgloves… I thought they were waterproof, but they weren’t. So I could only do that for a little bit. I don’t know, I just kept doing it. It felt like something to do. I’d go out and get bored and start chipping at the ice. Then all the ice was gone and I stopped doing that. I’d be worried about my dogs barking, if I was sleeping in the yard, actually. There are some neighborhood dogs, and you can hear them at night, and my dogs would, you know, bark with them, I think. Hey, how’s your dog doing? And do you think it’s ok to lie to doctors?
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zac smith is cool thanks
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image: Lindsay Hargrave
Rejection Letters 