Category: meta

Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma My Verona!

Dirty sneakers, an eviscerated pig photo bombs.

Oh, most arrogant wretch.

Fie. Fie. Fie. Why do I deign to write? What conceit have I, that to put my counterfeit words next to royal scribes before and near me? Whose language I share, but in comparative use, I despair?

To spend evening past perched near the world’s stage, soul undone by the Bard’s poetry in the two hours’ traffic rage. I set my trespass on our shared language as I prate on.

Soft, soft. Anon I will publish this hopeless screed, awaiting the black emptiness, the complete loneliness of whispering into a void. And yet, still, I type. Perchance to dream.

Mark. I type for thee, Loyal Reader. Or if I would fain prove true, I, indeed, write for me.

Posted on by docthink 1

A Less Than Worthwhile Post

champagne

Oh, geez. There is not a post here to be had. Nope. No post.

This is just a Post that acknowledges that a post is posted every day. And this day, this day that is today, acknowledges more duty than purpose.

Also, drink less champagne. But, that said, I love champagne.

Posted on by docthink 0

Falling Behind

This was a stunning September morning. The Beast led the way.

At the beginning of a conference call, one of the participants gave us the MidWest weather report. According to her, the weather was nice, and that was weird, but that will soon change. That is that both the nice and the weird will change, and the weather will be back to the regularly scheduled bad. It was apropos of nothing. An odd non sequitur. And not very interesting, bless her heart.

How many times have I written about the weather this year. Six times? Maybe ten? How many ways can I describe the change in weather? The heat? The cool? The sun filtering through the trees, making shadows on the sidewalk, sending up an artist’s palette of colors?

How many times have I posted my morning stroll? It is always about the air–crisp, heavy, frigid, humid. It’s about the light–dark, bright, layered, orange or purple. Storms–rain, snow or just wind–have provided fodder for my daily writing struggle.

Is it enough that I’m using the weather as a tool to write descriptively? Is it better that I sometimes use the weather as a metaphor? Is it of value that I use the weather to transmit a small tale?

Have I committed the worst sin of writing, by boring you, My Loyal Reader?

I took on the challenge to write every day. I know that the quality is uneven. I know that there has been more than a score, maybe even four score, of less than stellar results. But dull?

Maybe I’ll reconsider my framing. I’m not delivering a weather report. I am describing the environment–how it looks and how it smells and how it feels and how it sounds. I am practicing using words to share details so you can imagine what I am thinking, so you have some context, and to bring us closer together.

This morning the shadows were longer and the air was cooler. I stepped onto the porch but kept my hand on the door handle to push it back open. I needed a little something.

I went to the hall closet and found my black Hope and Change hoodie. It’s eight years old now. It’s stretched out at the cuffs, the zipper catches on loose threads at the bottom and there are little holes in the left pocket, the one that holds the treats. I blame the Beast.

I pulled on the worn fleece, but didn’t zip it.

The leaves on the trees were still green, but some had given up. The sidewalk was spotted with dry leaves. They skittered along the concrete until they crunched under paw or sneaker. Definitely a sign.

We’re on the cusp of the next season. But we’re not there, yet. Summer still has some breath left. She will be elbowing back and forth with Fall for the next few weeks. Until Fall wins the match. I never did pack my sweaters away. Now it’s definitely too late.

As always, Loyal Reader, thank you for your time and for imbibing with me and my thinkings through another season. Almost time to pack away the summer.

Posted on by docthink 0

Post #198

A break in the trees at the National Arboretum. Stylized.

Oh, jeez. I suffered by writing most of today. And I am going to take a pause as well as some credit for a post today.

I wrote today using incomplete sentences. I wrote using stupidly long words. I wrote in a stiff and stifled fashion. I wrote because I had to, but not like it was me writing. Like some person who seemed like me was writing. So. I am writing a few words so late today, just a few words, that are authentically my own.

I am including a nice picture in lieu of a decent post. This picture was snapped on a day we took a walk in the National Arboretum. If you haven’t been there, I recommend it. On another day, I will write about an occurrence there with the Big Guy.

So this might not be an interesting post, but I bet I got you interested in a future post.

Posted on by docthink 0

Blank Space

Evidence of going nowhere with writing. An empty sheet of paper and a pile of crumpled up ones.

Today is a day that does not produce words. Nothing easy came to mind. And the difficult stuff, while abundant, need more time–and much more energy–than I can muster.

So, Loyal Reader, thank you for your visit today. But this is all.

Posted on by docthink 0

Post #153

Path back up the mountain at Giant's Causeway, Northern Ireland.

I haven’t written a process post for a long time. Not since I had that spat of poor posts a few months back.

Today I’m writing about writing because I’m simply not feeling it. The writing, that is. I flipped through my notepad to see what I could work up today. There are twenty-four starts in that file. No finishes.

There are a few openings that are just a sentence or two. Just the beginning of an idea. In other cases, there’s a solid idea with no heft. Discounting those, there are still fifteen or sixteen with minimally a paragraph. Most of those are a paragraph with some change or a pair of paragraphs with some change. Then there’s four or five that have been worked to a couple hundred words.

Those are the sad ones. The entries that began to take shape, started to flow and then were writus interruptus.

Some starts were overtaken by a better, or a more timely, or a more immediately engaging (for me) finish. Others just lost juice. Some were jotted down in a fit of inspiration. They seemed to be a substantial concept, but dissolved like wisps of neurotransmitted-cotton candy on your tongue. With less of the stickiness of the sugary form. And less sweetness.

I don’t know that I’ll ever get back to these semi-baked items.

Or any of them for that matter.

These snippets of thoughts are captured but won’t be stretched and pulled along the path to semi-coherence. I won’t work on moving their sentences around like puzzle pieces, searching and finding the correct nub on a part of the piece that fits to the left, and then matches a piece on the right and finally snaps into pithy congruence from both above and below.

I won’t flip clauses from the end of a sentence to the beginning or from the beginning of the sentence to the end in an attempt to get it closer to clarity. There will be no speed backspacing to obliterate fraught word combos that briefly seemed poetic. There will be no annulment  of ridiculous over-adverbification.

These fragments won’t ever be pushed to the end of the literary line. Where I realize that it’s actually done as it sits. Another paragraph unnecessary. The writing at it’s natural end. This always surprises me. And it pleases me.

They’ll be no selection of an image to accompany these incomplete thoughts. Where sometimes an image comes early, but usually it is selected after the thoughts are decently formed. The thoughts won’t get far enough for a picture. The words only exist on the notepad, without form.

The sprouts of copy will never be copied and pasted into this forum. This forum that you, Loyal Reader, are consuming now.

Actually, that’s not accurate.  On a rare occasion, an embryonic post is moved here and festers. Not decomposing because it has no carbon, but not fully composed because it has no life. It doesn’t get the electrical jolt of the blue publish button. It’s not alive.

The prenatal posts in my notepad are accumulating. There weren’t always a generation of them. The group started with a few false starts. But as I read through them today, for inspiration, I only culled two. I was inspired by none.

None were used today. They were neither easy enough to finish nor inspiring enough to develop. I wrote this instead. I’m at peace with this. Not everything is good enough. At the same time, everything is good enough for practice.

So, the sad attempts remain sad. And I am moving on.

Posted on by docthink 1

For Naught

A zero that has a WTF air.

I was trying too hard. I was getting nowhere. I was working on a grand metaphor and delivered a grand goose egg.

It was easier a few weeks ago, this writing thing. I’m still struggling. I’m think I’m having issues. When I write something that I think is good or worthy, I post with aplomb. But I feel like I just created a standard, and that I can’t publish something less worthy the following day. Sometimes I can pull it off–something good, that is–other times I take an idea and knead it and toss it and stomp on it and I write it and it’s more pedestrian and I have a hard time hitting the publish button.

So when I was trying to write the big thing, I got nothing. I didn’t even get to the actual writing part. I know that there is something there, but it has to sit a while.

And instead, I’ll write this. More of a confession than a post. But I’m going to publish it.

Posted on by docthink 0

From the Ashes

A covert view of my work area. It's not pretty.

It happened. It hadn’t yet, so I, like Bill Clinton during the raging bull market of the nineties, thought that cycles of boom and bust were nevermore. Simple hubris. I am a fool. The rules of the world do apply to me.

The thoughts that became words that fed my keyboard that populated the screen that had formed Thinkings with little effort became thoughts that rushed then halted in disconnected sentences and fragments of sentences.

I look at the three shapeless sets of paragraphs and partial graphs in my notebook, and three stubs that I typed into this platform, and that total gimmick that I posted to fulfill my promise of publishing. Every. Stinking. Day. Even as that “achievement” was a technicality dressed up as cleverness. (The Big Guy said it wasn’t even clever. He’s right.)

I rejected a haiku. I’ve posted haiku in desperation before. So please know that the reject was of a truly unacceptable combination of syllables. An affront to 5-7-5. Even as a cheat it wasn’t publishable.

I may not have rejected it, or at least worked harder to make it acceptable, except that nothing was working. Publishing that sad haiku amid a rash of other weak Thinkings? The good can’t compensate for the bad if there is no good. You can’t average up. My craft, in its current disheveled state, might be devolving to a bad Tumblr of “funny” gifs where you substitute gifs with cheap writing tricks. After riding high, my writing wave was on a downward trajectory. The boom met the bust.

I had been planning a self-congratulatory post tomorrow, on the occasion of what was to be my one-hundredth post this year. As if, somehow reaching a fake milestone was the goal. And, in order to make that happen, given that I failed and did not write yesterday [this is not entirely true since I committed 213 words to screen among two limp threads–but I again digress in my digression], I would need to create TWO posts today. And back date one so I don’t miss a day. And I could crow about my achievement.

As if you care at all about that, Loyal Reader. As if you have a calendar in front of you placing X’s on the days that I publish. As if you are even reading this now!?!

I confronted myself with this chicanery. I realized that calling it chicanery was another parlor trick to avoid identifying bullshit backdating as what it is. Dishonest. Oww. That hurts. Yet, I believe that if I am writing, if I am exploring this form, that I need to be honest.

So, I failed in publishing. Every. Stinking. Day. I’m okay with that. I lost track of the point of this exercise. I’m not trying to sweat through every step of a marathon to prove that I can do it. Because, really, who the hell cares? See above.

What I am trying to do is to take those thoughts in my head that have been begging me to flesh them out–seriously, they beg me. I’m trying to punch them and knead them until they achieve coherence and can be expressed and delivered. The point is to spend some of my time creating and not just consuming. The point is to practice so that I can create better.

To  build my practice, I sometimes have to force myself to grasp at vapors of ideas and try to make something. Ideas that were not begging to come out and are just vehicles for the work. And sometimes, I won’t succeed in achieving coherence. But that makes me better. Unless I cheat.

My 100th-day reflection arrives a day early and a post short. It’s not the self-congratulations that I envisioned on day 83 when I spied Day 100 in my sights. Instead it’s a tale that recognizes a wretched fail just two days before that marker. Except that that marker is meaningless and that fail therefore is, too. [Thank you 4th grade math and the Transitive Property of Equality.]

As I reflect, I’m thinking that if I’m going to lie, it better be for a really really good reason. I’m thinking I should never ever lie to myself. I’m thinking that I don’t need to get bollixed up in bollocks. I’m thinking that if I’m always winning, then I’m not trying hard enough. I’m thinking–and remembering–that I’m setting my agenda.

I’m thinking about you, Loyal Reader, too. Thanks for playing along.

Posted on by docthink 1

First Word Struggle

Tearing down the green drapes to make a dress.

I did a bunch of writing at work today.

Unsatisfying writing.

It’s writing something that requires a specific straightjacket–I mean format. It’s the reworking of reworked copy.

These drafts have passed through so many, like a hand me down jacket. They’re  misshapen and stretched out around the cuffs. Some of the hands manipulating the draft may have been full of newsprint. Some of the fingertips may have just kneaded dough and are full of flour. Nobody washed before handling. It wasn’t because they didn’t want to, there just wasn’t time.

Now the scrolls have sat for a while. While we finished and published one branch, we ran out of time and deferred the rest. Anyway, it’d be better if we took some time.  The time has been taken. We lost some momentum. So now we might have taken too much time. The words are starting to funk. Or put me in a funk.

I’ve been working on trying to rebuild a rhythm. One like we had for the first round. But holding on to this pile of nouns and verbs, of bullets and hyperlinks-to-be isn’t making it better. It’s making me bitter.

It’s like that mess in the pantry that needs to be cleared out, reshuffled and restocked. Yet it  just feels recycled.

I’ve been fighting with this unsatisfying project for too long. I need to put a pen to it. An end to it.

Instead, I say in my best Katie Scarlett O’Hara, “Fiddle-dee-dee! I’ll think about it tomorrow.”

Unsatisfying.

Posted on by docthink 2