Week #6: Valentine's Day Ruins

I'm feeling older today than I ever have. Heh -- course, I am older today than ever, so that makes sense, right? So are you. But you know what I mean.

So, the moral of the story is that I've spent a wad of my rapidly diminishing supply of years learning yet again bitter truths that I already knew about trust and words and the Nature of Things. It seems that I'm never too old for a refresher course. A new lesson, however, and one slowly and painfully learned, is that I'm capable of the most egregious degree of suspension of disbelief, of listening and crediting any nonsensical string of words while standing credulous as a country rube, slack-jawed and mazed with wonder. Whether this has always been true and I just hadn't noticed or is a new development in my life remains to be seen.

In any event, it's a newly-discovered weakness I have to account and make allowance for from now on. Never too old to have another lesson razor-carved through the bark and down to the phloem, I guess, and if nothing else, it has given the hard-core rationalist in me something to laugh at..

Carving To The Meat - Good For You, Right?

Wrote a thousand into Scrivener as a true-life entry for modification into a story.

Tossed it out.

Wrote another thousand or fifteen hundred into this blog.

Tossed it out.

Wrote just under two thousand into an email that just didn't matter for shit.

Tossed it out.

How To Use The
(CTRL+A) (Del)
Professional Editing Tool

Well, crap. THIS ain't working. So, let's move on to examining WTF the problem is anyway:

Most writing advice starts out with some version of "Write What You Know." After all, what you know best is stuff that you personally have lived, witnessed, laughed and/or bled over. So when they say to write what you know, they're telling you to write your life.

And there's not a single, solitary thing about my life that I can write about that's of any substance.

I mean, there's trivia; what I had for breakfast (most of a large pot of opaque-black coffee, way oversweetened with cane-sugar crystals,) my thoughts on the raccoons eating all the cat food (I'm against it,) my contemplations on the pros and cons of getting on my motorcycle and just disappearing (probably not because I'm a hide-bound Responsible Adult, not some fucking hippie with a life.)

But it's all bullshit. The important parts, the parts that have splintered through my ribcage, the parts that mattered when I was younger and doing things that mattered, the stuff that I do now trying to empty the ocean with a tin cup, but still matters sometimes...can't write any of it. Some of it's pain. Some of it's by law. Some of it's common decency. Some of it's -- well, some of it's just stuff you don't write about. Well, I don't write about. I'm doubtless an amusing, sad-sack entry elsewhere on the Internet.

No, there's a lie. I can write about it. I can't publish it.

Someday when I'm long since gone, someone will run across the pile of notebooks and data storage I have in a safe-deposit box. No one knows I have the box and it's not in any of my records. When I set it up, I checked into what happens when I finally go tits up.

Tits Up -- The Next Big Stop

I stay paid up a year in advance with a monthly auto-payment. That means that when the paycheck stops, they won't even notice for a year. Then, after 90 days of no payment, they'll try to notify me, but since my phone number will also be deader than Dillinger, that won't work. The address they'll mail to is a dead-end/dead-letter box that was set up with cash and a contract of what we may refer to as "variable accuracy."

Over the course of the next 18 months to 2 years there will be increasingly sporadic and lackadaisical attempts to find me, and then it will become unclaimed property. They will file notice with the State, and will eventually drill the locks and pull the box and move it to another safe. Then they'll store it for 5 years while the State publishes unclaimed property notices. Then they'll be allowed to re-classify it as "abandoned," and they finally will take title and possession and auction the box to some lucky soul and/or corporation. Which means that if my lights go out tomorrow, the earliest anyone's going to see anything in there is somewhere between 2020 and 2025.

My Catalog of Published Work

I'm guessing that at that point, I won't care, and more to the point, neither will they. After buying the box sight unseen, they'll find a few hundred dollars (yay!) and a bunch of my scribblings (WTF is THIS trash?) assuming that anyone can get to them at all because of technical obsolescence. (Think about it: You seen any reel-to-reel tape data recovery stuff lately?) It'll doubtless make a decorative addition to whatever passes for a landfill in The Land O' The Future.

So why do it, why write the shit in the first place? What's the point?

I don't know. It's not like it's even all of it. Mostly I write huge chunks of stuff, and when I finally trail off at the end of those hours, glance back over it and think "Oh, yeah. THAT'S a story that needs told," then punch the "delete" button (which is what I did most of the night last night.) Some gets kept, although I'm pretty unclear on why. Burning it's a substantial hassle, but at least is cathartic. So, how about just not writing it at all in the first place?

Not write? Yeah, that will happen. Working for hours, bleeding ink, writing ephemera that's going to literally disappear forever is pretty stupid, to be honest, and I don't know why I bother.

It just is, that's all.

They Probably Get It

But I would not be astounded if someday I emptied that narrow little tin box into a high-desert campfire on a whim. It would be pretty, anyhow.

Full Moon Over The High Desert
(Publisher Blazing Under The Cooking Tripod)

I just gotta remember to get the cash out first.