Stinky Breath
My breath is stinky, and writing this is hard. My shoulders ache. Not the bones, exactly, but the muscles around the bones and across the back and a little bit into the arm. My calves burn when I walk. My face is probably greasy, I don’t know, I haven’t looked yet. I’m kind of hungry and don’t feel like doing anything about it. It’s drizzling out and I suspect that it will continue to drizzle and that kind of weather makes me sleeeeeepy and ineffectual.
Is staring at a blank page better than just staring out the window with the laptop on top of my lap? I am going to say that it is, because when you look at a blank screen and you have no reason not to write then you just start to write, which is to say that I just start to write, which is the source of this babble we are babbling right now (the royal ‘We’). The insides of my nose and ears itch, also. I forgot to mention that before.
I am going to go out on a limb and say that the most difficult part of writing for other people is in knowing what other people will like and won’t like. I mean, the truth is that for a long time I didn’t really like much of anything I read, at least in terms of poetry. I just smiled and said ‘yeah ok,” and that was that. I mean there were stories that I enjoyed and stories I had to suffer through, and poems that were fun and poems that weren’t, but I have a poorly refined sense of precisely what it is that I like or dislike about a particular piece of wordstrings, which is a word I just invented for any written work. I’m a little bit chilly, too.
But even harder than figuring out what I like is wondering what other people would like, especially since “other” people is such a large and poorly defined group of people. Who knows what they like? A lot of them can’t even read! Many no doubt have no use for poetry or prose or even fictional stories in their lives, some may even be stuck on the idea that writing and reading is gay, or some such madness. But I guess I’m not writing for those people anyway, as they surely wouldn’t be interested in anything I have to say or want to be or how I see things. So maybe I should just write for a small group of idealized and fictionalized characters in my head who I believe represent a fairly inclusive cross-section of people who not only dig reading, but would dig the stuff that I have to write. But that sounds hard and complicated, because frankly I still have no idea what any other person enjoys reading. Perhaps that’s something worth looking into.
So being lazy and not really planning to write professionally, at least not any time soon, I suppose I will just have to continue writing what I find to be amusing, just as I behave at most times in a way that I find appropriate and enjoyable. It is conceivable that there are enough people who are vaguely like me in enough important fundamental ways that my writing will be appreciated by some of those who read it, and I will be saved the terrible trouble of having to direct my thinking through the filters of another human being.
Of course, I do have to keep those filters in mind. I mean, I can’t write utter nonsense (all the time) and expect anyone else to get what I’m doing. We each attach certain meanings to words and I have to respect that, even as I push and bend their present understandings, if I am going to succeed in communication on any level. Gods the muscles surrounding my spine are crying to me! Writhing about!
Writhe, spine muscles, you are awake today.
Is staring at a blank page better than just staring out the window with the laptop on top of my lap? I am going to say that it is, because when you look at a blank screen and you have no reason not to write then you just start to write, which is to say that I just start to write, which is the source of this babble we are babbling right now (the royal ‘We’). The insides of my nose and ears itch, also. I forgot to mention that before.
I am going to go out on a limb and say that the most difficult part of writing for other people is in knowing what other people will like and won’t like. I mean, the truth is that for a long time I didn’t really like much of anything I read, at least in terms of poetry. I just smiled and said ‘yeah ok,” and that was that. I mean there were stories that I enjoyed and stories I had to suffer through, and poems that were fun and poems that weren’t, but I have a poorly refined sense of precisely what it is that I like or dislike about a particular piece of wordstrings, which is a word I just invented for any written work. I’m a little bit chilly, too.
But even harder than figuring out what I like is wondering what other people would like, especially since “other” people is such a large and poorly defined group of people. Who knows what they like? A lot of them can’t even read! Many no doubt have no use for poetry or prose or even fictional stories in their lives, some may even be stuck on the idea that writing and reading is gay, or some such madness. But I guess I’m not writing for those people anyway, as they surely wouldn’t be interested in anything I have to say or want to be or how I see things. So maybe I should just write for a small group of idealized and fictionalized characters in my head who I believe represent a fairly inclusive cross-section of people who not only dig reading, but would dig the stuff that I have to write. But that sounds hard and complicated, because frankly I still have no idea what any other person enjoys reading. Perhaps that’s something worth looking into.
So being lazy and not really planning to write professionally, at least not any time soon, I suppose I will just have to continue writing what I find to be amusing, just as I behave at most times in a way that I find appropriate and enjoyable. It is conceivable that there are enough people who are vaguely like me in enough important fundamental ways that my writing will be appreciated by some of those who read it, and I will be saved the terrible trouble of having to direct my thinking through the filters of another human being.
Of course, I do have to keep those filters in mind. I mean, I can’t write utter nonsense (all the time) and expect anyone else to get what I’m doing. We each attach certain meanings to words and I have to respect that, even as I push and bend their present understandings, if I am going to succeed in communication on any level. Gods the muscles surrounding my spine are crying to me! Writhing about!
Writhe, spine muscles, you are awake today.
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