I've just spent two hours (not unpleasant hours I must admit, thanks in no small part to Death in Vegas) fiddling with profile options on Live Journal, trying to get them just right, like the fuel / air mix on an airplane or the pH of a swimming pool, so that I have the most fecund environment into which I could cast the seeds of my imagination. Little tweaks here - do I want all comments uploaded to Twitter and likewise, all Twitter postings captured here? - little permissions denied there - NO FB links, thanks - and just when the time had come to finally stop procrastinating and get stuck in, virtual pen in hand and coffee with chocolate digestive at a convenient distance (not too close to the laptop, not so far away that I might need to stretch), all I could see was the vast empty space of the Internet. Sometimes you eat the abyss and sometimes...
All that directionless but febrile activity has burned out the synapses.
At least, that's a good excuse for now. I genuinely suspect that there was nothing in the bag to start with, no seeds there to cast; just husks that retained the impression of life within but which had been expended long ago. As usual, I've squandered a lot of mental energy on things with no value or purpose, whilst that which was important has withered on the vine or wandered gently away to find more suitable pasture. One might posit the rejoinder that at least I'm self-aware, but then if I learn nothing from the repetition of mistakes, surely I'm not that aware. And reading Fred Exley and Glen Duncan last week, I suspect that I'm not the only one condemned by stubbornly durable habit to endlessly re-drawing the mechanical patterns created by the machinery that springs up in the space around us - the waking patterns, the eating patterns, the working patterns, the lying-to-ones-self patterns. I'm not that good at breaking habits (here I might reference smoking and drinking to prove the point), and life is the most durable habit of all.
As I sat in front of the screen, staring at the options available to me on Live Journal, my eye was caught by a maxim stolen shamelessly from the blog of a young writer that I'd carefully placed in lieu of actually having to write a biog for the site. To paraphrase - writing is hard, as instead of starting at the beginning and working to the end, as when one reads a story, one is plunged into the middle and must fight to get out! With no fight comes no story; no one makes it out alive to tell the tale. Zombie story-telling! A lovely local author once related to my wife the observation that writing was a full time job for her - up at five, feed the pets, take the kids to school, back at the desk and writing by eight and nose down until five. That's a lot of fight, a lot of graft, and my habit would be to blow out my cheeks and say, "Well, we'll have a look at that after a cup of tea, and maybe do some laundry..." I've poured my will to write into a very welcoming pit of online interactions (with machines no less) that daily eat up my time and effort.
That's why I love my typewriter.
I suspect now would be the opportune moment to wield Occam's Razor and cut back to the elegant and simple solution - start a new notebook, dust off the typewriter, and turn the fucking computer off.
All that directionless but febrile activity has burned out the synapses.
At least, that's a good excuse for now. I genuinely suspect that there was nothing in the bag to start with, no seeds there to cast; just husks that retained the impression of life within but which had been expended long ago. As usual, I've squandered a lot of mental energy on things with no value or purpose, whilst that which was important has withered on the vine or wandered gently away to find more suitable pasture. One might posit the rejoinder that at least I'm self-aware, but then if I learn nothing from the repetition of mistakes, surely I'm not that aware. And reading Fred Exley and Glen Duncan last week, I suspect that I'm not the only one condemned by stubbornly durable habit to endlessly re-drawing the mechanical patterns created by the machinery that springs up in the space around us - the waking patterns, the eating patterns, the working patterns, the lying-to-ones-self patterns. I'm not that good at breaking habits (here I might reference smoking and drinking to prove the point), and life is the most durable habit of all.
As I sat in front of the screen, staring at the options available to me on Live Journal, my eye was caught by a maxim stolen shamelessly from the blog of a young writer that I'd carefully placed in lieu of actually having to write a biog for the site. To paraphrase - writing is hard, as instead of starting at the beginning and working to the end, as when one reads a story, one is plunged into the middle and must fight to get out! With no fight comes no story; no one makes it out alive to tell the tale. Zombie story-telling! A lovely local author once related to my wife the observation that writing was a full time job for her - up at five, feed the pets, take the kids to school, back at the desk and writing by eight and nose down until five. That's a lot of fight, a lot of graft, and my habit would be to blow out my cheeks and say, "Well, we'll have a look at that after a cup of tea, and maybe do some laundry..." I've poured my will to write into a very welcoming pit of online interactions (with machines no less) that daily eat up my time and effort.
That's why I love my typewriter.
I suspect now would be the opportune moment to wield Occam's Razor and cut back to the elegant and simple solution - start a new notebook, dust off the typewriter, and turn the fucking computer off.
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