I am a peripatetic. I have to move. To take the bus is lovely, but ultimately unrewarding in a world where my transport is built onto my torso in the form of usable legs.

Wait. I thought this post was about the materials of your writing? 

It is. Be patient. *Ahem* So, walking. Yes. I walk. A lot. And during walking, I “figure stuff out.” I don’t write; my aim isn’t to compose, or arrange, or organize. No. My main goal is to let my brain do what my whole body is doing: be a flaneur. Roam. Etc.

Walking is important to my creative being. For some reason, walking allows me to think differently, to absorb the world into my obsessions, and for me to react back into the world, letting my obsessions and interests permeate it. At the end of all this walking, more often than not, I have a more tightly wound piece of jute to weave. If I can’t write/think past a particularly fraying bit of a story, paper, whatever, I’ll go out and amble. If nothing else, I get my exercise in.

Walking wears out materials. Especially jeans and shoes. Perspicacious fellows will notice embarrassing holes in the upper interior thigh areas of my pants. Lots of thigh friction in my thought-building. [Thus, I bought new jeans today. Yay.] And feet need love just as thighs/legs do, so it’s important to have good shoes. I recently got a new pair of walking shoes after 8 years. And this was only because my wife politely asked if I could retire them. And because they started to emit a fetid stench so subterranean that even certain soft cheeses asked me to leave off. These shoes, they were–quite plainly–deliquescing.

And so the bedrock of my whole procedure as a writer starts with basic clothing, really. Shod feet, durable denim. We could be ridiculous and say that all of this is material in the sense that food sustains our bodies, and thus we write. But I start from where it seems most applicable.