6:30 pm
Dear J,
Trying to write while sitting waiting for my order at Janges. It is a bad time to eat out. Lots of students walking on the side of the road sharing space with wreckless drivers. Lots are ordering. I saw a car trying to park at Seoul Kitchen stop a woman cycling uphill. She had to push her weight up after the car managed to park as all her momentum were lost. Too many cars, too little space. Most of these people are locals just a few minutes of walk away. But they need to write their cars out of necessity. I heard a driver once say, she needed to ride the car because it will get destroyed if she didn’t. A perfect allegory of the modern life.
We’ve been waiting for our burger for about 10 mins already. Burger cooks longer than silog. Perhaps because the silog doesnt have to be cooked. It just needs to be prepared.
Another car parks near Seoul Kitchen. This time no parking space is a ailable. The car an elegant black parks at the side of the already narrow road, its left portruding into the road. The woman who went out of the car communicates to her husband the driver via phone even when they’re just two meters apart. She may have informed him to fix his parking. He moves and again stops a coupld walking and a tricycle. Now another car gets out of a oarking space while another enters Pearl. Both white cars stop momentarily. Drivers chat. They know each other. The guard directs the black car on how to fill in the now vacant parking space. In less than five minutes, the road is clearer once again for walkers. Students continue walking.
My burger arrived.
But unlike physical drafts, digital generic materials are less faithful to metadata such as age. If one forgets to put the date on the note, one looses that if the notes are copy pasted. If changes are not tracked, they all vanish to extinction. Therefore, tracking changes in a draft requires intentionality, more than perhaps is required in physical drafts. What it misses in protecting metadata, namely the contents themselves, it fills up by durability. As long as backed up, digital drafts are protected from the wear and tear of matter.
It is only apt that a writing methodology around walking is biased towards the in-betweens: process, practices, drafts. When one walks, one is always in transit. A draft is also in transit. It is a thing by itself without fully becoming what the author intends it to be. But a case can be made that all writing is unfinished. Even those published are drafts. In the Talahardin, evergreens can still be changed although it is expected that they do so minutely. But this category does not signify finality. In fact, an evergreen can revert back to seedlings if a future insight necessitates that it undergoes more significant revisions.
Some drafts were not meant by writers to be published. The Talahardin is different as it intends to publish unfinished works.