R-350 BURN PILE: Running A Bore Brush Through My Past

My Archive, Storage Area #1

I'm thinking about instituting a sub-genre on this blog for a certain class of my fictional crapola. All of them will have the label “BURN PILE”. Yet to be determined is whether I ever actually get around to putting any up since by tomorrow when the Irish has worn off this may well seem a perfectly shit idea.

If I do, they are all the purest fiction. I’m making it all up. If the question comes up whether what I’m writing is happening or has happened, the answer is “no”, so just relax, OK? And, incidental to that, if you’re trying to sort out a chronology, you can’t, because:

A. I’m not bashful about time-shifting stories where needed, or sometimes even when not; and,

B. IT’S FICTION. Like everything in this entry and probably upwards of 90% of this entire blog, for example.

I’m lately revisiting a lot of my life via decades of paper and notebooks and whatnot. Most are literally on their way to the burn pile. There are a lot of stories in there. And a lot of them will die with me for a variety of statutory and personal reasons that I’m not going to get into. 

So far, as I've noted in earlier posts, it’s been a pretty long life. As an incidental matter, I have hopes of it being a damned sight longer. But DAYUM does it accumulate a lot of junk.

I’ll be moving on to a brand-new, never-before-dunnit life-phase in the next year or so. All this junk is anchoring me more firmly to the past than I care to be anchored, especially considering that if something is in that pile, it’s usually something that I could probably live the rest of my life without ever seeing again, thanks.

There’s a lot, but only fragments are useful — or usable, as you will — for this media.

Isn’t it weird that we keep meticulous records of the bad on paper or data storage or in our heads, but there’s rarely a line written for the good, especially the ordinary good, the day-to-day stuff?

I suspect it’s because we all think that the good stuff won’t fade, and we don’t need to write it down or mentally bookmark it. Maybe it’s because we think that the good stuff should be our default and doesn’t need recorded — the bad stuff is the exception that requires documentation. Maybe people are just strange that way.

Whatever. It’s all going out. It’s gonna take time. Maybe months. Or maybe I’ll just get fed up with curating it and haul it out into the desert for a bonfire. The human-recorded part of history is boring, after all, consisting largely of scrawled grocery lists and call logs and illegible old dental appointments on long-expired calendars. 

This is a good thing, as it means that we can ignore most of it and actually learn about the interesting parts of 150,000 years of humans in a few years instead of bogging down in the tedious gray sludge that makes up most of human history’s actual day-to-day activities.

If I do this, don’t expect neat, Hollywood-style stories. Most of my stories, although fictional (see above) lack any satisfying ending or moral lesson, or redemption, or…anything. Chaos is a valid description of life, after all, and my fictional life is all that.

I mean, picking a page at random from an early-2000s notebook, how do I make a story arc out of a gorgeous but viciously mercenary 22 year-old stripper who wound up killed when her nearly 60-year-old delusional white knight who'd lost nearly everything for her drove up next to her at the frontage road stoplight with a 12-gauge and blew her brains into the passenger seat? A true romance template, perhaps? And if so, where does her blood-splattered 2-year-old kid who slept through the whole thing strapped in his car-seat behind her fit into the formula? Anyone have any epiphanies here that lock in the moral of the story?

Naw. Check into your story-telling “how-to” books, your English Comp classes, your MFA program notes. You’ll find that you need to START there, then have a resolution. Or if that’s the ending, we have to have gotten there by taking a path wherein we or whoever is passing for protagonist learns something profound. But that’s not how it works. Waiting for the world to resolve itself, freeze frame, and go to commercial is like waiting for a happy ending in Squid Games. It ain’t happening.

So, read these turgid little nuggets or not, as you will. Maybe you can make something of them. This assumes, of course, that this still seems like an idea tomorrow or the next day or the next, and I ever get around to putting any up.