I’m doing the thing again. I finally got up early so I can actually give some proper attention to the thing I’m supposed to be doing — writing. I still regard that now as “the thing I’m supposed to be doing.” I don’t know why life is so much more bearable for humans when we have a thing we’re supposed to do, but it is.
This blog for me is my heartbeat. Its sole purpose is to just keep going, so I cay say every day that I at least wrote something. I really should write down more, even small pieces during the day.
I should do a lot of things.
I should keep up that schedule I keep trying to make for myself — that daily list of “shit I have to do — and get it all done. I can get a lot done today because I didn’t drink last night and I feel relatively fine. I can haul a lot of junk out and get it all to the dump. Clearing things out is the name of the game for me lately, out of my physical space and also out of my mind. There’s too much floating around in there, too much clutter and fog when what I need is space and clarity.
I repeat myself a lot when I’m just writing. I think maybe we all do. It’s no matter because no one will read this. It’s just exhaust, it’s output. It’s just a thudding heartbeat. Nobody minds how fast or slow it goes.
I’ve got this impulse to do some free writing, like I used to do. So I’m going to do that now and let the italics be my excuse:
Dead weight and a lively conversation, sunlight bouncing off a killer fight that you have no business adjudicating… Word salad from the brain of someone who’s not supposed to be senile yet. You can really get yourself into the shitter if you need to, can really screech about something that is not the matter when there is no point beyond what you have told yourself. You can screech all you like about the weight underneath you and make light of something that lies at the bottom of a deep gravity well. But you cannot joke about the possibility of life on other planets or the point of keeping yourself alive long enough to see something beautiful. You have to understand that you might not live long enough to understand what the point of all of this was — you might just have to strain yourself less deeply and keep it all together the way you wished.
The point of writing that sort of thing by hand in the past is gone, but I did improve my handwriting a lot. Maybe I should keep that up for that purpose alone. I can dump all that paper in the recycling, though. It can go on to convey information of some value; for me the only purpose was to absorb a ton of garbage from my brain.
Recycling the electrons that this blog is made of will be just as easy. You can stretch it as deep as it can go and never have to worry about it. You can keep yourself going as deeply as you care to. Words, words, words… No one cares because no one reads it and it does not matter. All of it is matter — matter does not matter. The screech comes to a halt.
The point is just to go, and to keep going. If you get traction, if the muse comes back to you after all the time you’ve spent cheating on her, it will be while you are sitting faithfully at your keyboard ready to take down what she has to tell you. Otherwise you will be struck by no important ideas while you’re driving or showering or swimming. It’s like John Cleese said: you have to keep your mind resting against a problem in a kind but persistent manner, and then the solution will come to you. But you cannot do that unless you are actually working on the problem, you cannot do that unless you’re actually trying to solve it. If you fuck off and give up then you will solve nothing. You have to be working. You have to rest against the problem like a dog waiting to come inside.