Microdosing productivity by using verbs

I’ve never been so close to words before as I am now. We used to run naked into gonzo wilds armed with promiscuous vocabulary inspired by narcocorridos, witchcraft and Mexican folk stories. We’d see each other once in a while whenever I managed to sell a pitch to one of the Russian media outlets I wrote for from time to time. For a couple months I would experience a manic phase when words and I were inseparable —consuming each other in the most relentless ways and enjoying every second of it, masochistically, frenziedly. When the assignment was done, words and I would politely shake each other's hands, not knowing when we would meet again. 

When I said I wanted to make my living as a writer, I pictured it differently. Maybe because the word "writer" in Russian doesn't evoke someone struggling to find a synonym for the verb “allow” to use in an article about the benefits of GPS trackers. It evokes Patricia Highsmith battling with devils, lusts and strange desires, while drinking whisky with her snails. Or is it just me who imagines that? 

My relationship with words started to solidify into something more serious when I started writing copy for antique furniture. Gorgeous expensive household property that belonged to different centuries stimulated my imagination in ways that gonzo articles hadn’t. Their images gazed at me in silence; a silence like that of an old wiseman who takes a lengthy pause before telling you something mysterious but uncannily relatable. Sometimes it took them hours to open up to me. I believe some of them never really did. Like that 19th century Swedish wooden horse with virulent alopecia and deep hollows for eyes —I could sense she’d been through soul-crushing situations and didn’t want to go on living. But there she was, accompanied by me, her false biographer who was being paid to reinvent her life story in a way that would justify a several thousand-euro price tag. The Empire style cabinet breathes heavily — he exudes an arrogant nostalgia for a time when everything was hand-crafted from ebony wood and decorated with gilded bronze. Some pieces of furniture are real neo-classicist assholes. Even if their patina is not original, they boast, flaunt, impress with their masterfully carved baluster legs, gold-plated festoons, gracefully carved arches, and the perfect symmetry of their sleek lines. I love dealing with delicate words describing beautiful objects, gently grasping their ethereal meanings, slow-dancing in the water. 

My favorite adjectives for describing something ungraspable are: whimsical, oneiric, chimerical, fanciful. 

I’m so grateful for adjectives. I would decorate my apartment with them. I would sleep on them, eat off them, make love alongside them, polish them with special soap so they gleam. I’ve spent so much time on antique furniture web pages that Google now thinks that I’m rich and eccentric — exactly how I want to be seen by algorithms. My targeted ads are so exquisite and tasteful. 

The more I depend on writing as my source of income, the more utilitarian, unidealistic and mundane my relationship with words is becoming. The romance is dead. Gonzo stories are a thing of the past. Beautiful antique objects have now been almost entirely replaced by productivity tools for industrial machinery. Gone are my precious adjectives; here it’s all about verbs: offer, comply, allow, boost, optimize, streamline. The vocabulary of engines and digital systems. The language is sterile and friendly like an answering machine — a machine that is incapable of saying anything humanly meaningful, something that doesn’t involve tricky capitalist narratives. Words and I, do we live together now?

Any job can become alienating if you only work to pay rent. I try to be inventive in summoning the great engine spirit. I artificially stimulate excitement by doing different gigs simultaneously. I mix texts on fleet management with descriptions of 18th century bleached oak buffets and a press-release for an upcoming show curated by a friend. My meta-newsletter documents the process. So instead of being alienated by words, I let them alter my mind, transferring me to a hypnotic state where context is lost in pure form. Words are things-in-themselves, self-sufficient, independent from meaning. I affirm the equality of all words — in the bizarre collage of consensual senselessness, language and I become close again. Vehicle diagnostics tools are now amalgamated with Belgian porcelain strainers, providing full visibility of bold geometric elements that accentuate false narratives of reliable tracking systems enhanced by captivating miscellany of eclectic patterns exquisitely carved on tamper-proof hardware that can be concealed in the upper and lower compartments decorated with lovely fleur-de-lis moldings made by advanced technologies to last centuries. Maybe less. But longer than us.