Hindsight

I feel bad about posts like yesterday's sometimes, when they turn out to be just lists cataloguing stuff that happened or presumably will happen. Partly it reminds me of being in fifth grade and having to endure a lesson on writing transitions in my Language class. (I always want to call it English, since that's what it was called by the end when I was majoring in it, but I have to remind myself that in elementary and middle school it was called Language, and only in high school when we had to take a foreign language did differentiating it as English make sense.) My fifth grade language teacher was actually a lovely person and a fun teacher, but that lesson was burned unpleasantly in my brain. My teacher loved assigning creative writing to the class - stories incorporating vocabulary words, stories on certain themes - but apparently at some point she got sick of all of us writing the way that ten-year-olds talked: Joe went to the beach. Then he went swimming. Then he built a sand castle. But then some other kids knocked his sand castle down. So then Joe was sad. Then a starfish asked Joe why he was sad and Joe told him. Then a bunch of starfishes jumped out of the water and landed on the bullies and turned their stomachs inside out and dissolved the bullies' flesh with digestive juices. Certain ten-year-olds' obsessions with echinoderm-based revenge aside, the whole pervasive THIS-happened-then-THIS-happened-then-THIS-happened drumbeat got to be a bit much for our dear teacher, and she went into exhaustive instruction on using adverbs and dependent clauses and a basic trust that the reader knows how causal events unfold in a four-dimensional universe (I'm paraphrasing) to create narrative flow. It's actually a very valuable lesson to learn, and the reason why learning it is such an unpleasant memory is because I was ashamed at not having already intuitively grasped it. Fifth grade was right about when my nascent egomania reared up on its hind legs to become rampant, and school became less about picking up new knowledge and skills and more about showing off. But I had made the same missteps in my written stories as everyone else in my class, composing play-by-play recaps lousy with "then"s. I had thought I was better than everyone else and I didn't take kindly to being reminded I wasn't. Twenty-five years down the road, I've been thoroughly disabused of the notion of being better than everyone else, but I like to think I'm better than I was when I was ten. Falling back into old bad habits is unpleasant.

But another reason why I'm disappointed in myself for a post like yesterday's is because I want to keep a blog to ... well, for a couple of reasons, really. One is to have a quasi-deadline oriented reason to write every single day. Even if I write something that's disposable, of very little interest, and couldn't possibly be published anywhere else, at least I'm exercising the mental muscles involved in stringing words together coherently. It's the mental equivalent of getting on the treadmill and walking for twenty minutes, because that's all you can muster the energy for, even though you'd ideally be running for forty-five minutes every day. I feel like I need that, and when I fall back on the last-resort quotidian inventory type of post, at least I've cleared the bare minimum bar.

I don't just want to do the bare minimum, though, I want to have an outlet for saying things worth saying. Understand that I don't think there's anything wrong with my life - on the contrary, if you've been paying attention you'll know that I think my life is pretty rad. But as the old saw goes, whether your life is rad or not, if it's unexamined it's not worth living. And it's my general hope that by forcing myself to blog every day I'll also be forcing myself to examine my life, and to find the things worth talking about - observations of things I had never noticed before, examinations of things I know I obsessively overthink about, random memories recalled, philosophies crystallized. Kind of like Mel Brooks's Comicus character in history of the World Part One, who explains the nature of his job (stand-up philosopher) as "I coalesce the vapors of human experience into a viable and meaningful comprehension." Of course he is explaining this to Bea Arthur's clerk character at the unemployment office, and she responds with a scoffing, "Oh, you're a bullshit artist. Did you bullshit anyone last week? Did you try to bullshit anyone?" I acutely identify.


Related to that, blogging is good practice not only for the mechanics of writing but for being braver in my writing. I know that the only way to create something enduring and potent is by investing yourself in it, and putting yourself out there. I also know that that is way harder in practice than it sounds in theory, and especially for me in particular because by my nature I am very conflict-averse. I like pleasing people and I like keeping the peace. I like being able to socialize in large groups without making others uncomfortable. And I have years of practice smoothing over my rough edges, tamping down my excesses, and keeping certain deeply-held beliefs very private so as not to offend others. We live in a weird time and place where everyone operates under the default assumption that they are under constant threat of personal attack. Nobody would ever believe anything unless it were right, nothing can ever be right unless everything else is wrong, and therefore any opinion expressed is tantamount to drawing battle lines between what is said and everything else unspoken. Personally I do not subscribe to this belief system. If I say that The Crow is one of my favorite movies, I am in no way saying that anyone who dislikes it is empirically wrong and mentally deficient. People's reactions are going to be all over the map and I can only talk about mine. And on the other hand if I say that Xanadu, in spite of being a cult classic, is really a terrible movie, I'm still only talking about my reaction to it and I expect there to be people who disagree with me, and I feel no need to definitively settle who's right or who's wrong, if there even is such a thing. But still, I know that a lot of people take umbrage at what they perceive other people's opinions imply about their own, so I've learned to couch things in very qualified terms: "It's just my opinion, and I'm probably not a very good judge, but I think The Crow is probably one of the lushest-looking movies of the 90's, if you're into that sort of thing." And that's just pop-culture. I won't breathe a word about politics or religion except to my closest and most trusted friends.

Those are habits born of a need to be well-liked and stay out fights, and they are habits that I desperately need to break. I need to be able to plant a flag and stake a claim on an idea and risk being violently disagreed with. At least, I need to be able to do that in my writing - I don't want to become the overbearing, opinionated blowhard whom no one wants at their dinner parties. But I don't think it's a paradox to be personally pleasant and literarily honest. Not shocking, not provocative for its own sake, not necessarily cruel and punishing, just honest without excuse or apology. I've always been drawn more towards writing fiction, because that creates a certain separation between the writer and the work, and I think I've always needed that. I'm not saying that I really believe that bullies should be eaten alive by starfish, I'm examining what it means to be a young boy rescued from bullies by violently ravenous invertebrates. Which is all well and good, but I think I need to throw that blanket off for a while, and then pull it back on later once I've seen exactly what's underneath. So that's what I want to get at here - I'm not saying I've been entirely successful, or will be any time soon, but that's what I want. These posts are supposed to be my thoughts, for whatever they're worth, not my sanitized conversational quips but my real opinions. I don't want to focus so much on what's going on around me as what's going on inside me, which is not necessarily the more interesting of the two, or even the more important, but it matters to me. I have to be true to my inner bullshit artist, and if I work at it, maybe end up minus the bullshit.