Getting out

The thing about writing is that you have to do stuff in order to have stuff to write about.  At least that's the concept.  And the truth is, I don't do much now.  I get the impression that I spend most of my time in a fluorescent cubicle hell, or driving a mundane car down a monotonous highway, or watching stale TV on my couch.  I grimly diagnose my life as early-onset humdrum.

That said, I actually do move around a lot, considering I'm a human slug choking on apathy.  I work for 8 hours each day and do a lot of reading and talking while there.  My commute is complicated and can contain some curious interactions with other drivers.  I play with my son for a bit in the evenings, and read books aloud to him for almost an hour each night.  And while Gina & I do watch TV habitually, in my spare time I also design board games, write poetry, read the whole internet, and chop firewood.  So I do stuff--I move around and stuff--and that's just on normal days.  I also host a lot of dinners and go to some kinda high-brow parties and play music on the weekends and generally keep quite busy.

But the thing is, I discredit a lot of my life as boring--because it's repetitive.  I-95 is, let's face it, always different but never notable.  Work is just work; any American will tell you that.  My son doesn't do much that's noteworthy, owing to being 3 months old.  I could talk about my hobbies, but that's just sad.  The parties and hosting and all of that--really just a fairly normal social life.  Nothing unusual.

What's amazing to me here is that my life has always been boring in this perspective.  Always.  I never was the most fascinating person, I never lived the most interesting life.  I went to school, and had some friends, and we talked about theology and video games and ate 5-in-the-morning Waffle House breakfasts after staying up all night laughing about things I can't remember.  And after school, I played in bands, I guess--but that was always more fuss than glamor.  Find a place to practice, play the same songs four hundred times, set up shows and bring the equipment--then two hours of stage time, but honestly if you have to pee halfway through it's not that great.  I guess I went to internships and conferences in DC and New York--but mostly, really, they were indoor PowerPoint presentations.  I didn't do anything interesting in the evenings.

But somehow, I had stuff to write about.  I wrung meaning from sidewalk strangers.  I turned over thoughts from overheard conversations and table talk.  I shouldn't have been interesting--but, inevitably, when I look back at what I wrote, I'm interested.

So then: does writing assign value to otherwise awfully mundane streaks of time?  Or were my conversations, my experiences, more interesting in years past?  Is a life, observed, simply more interesting than the same life, just lived?

Death Machine

Recently, a friend of mine found out an old flame had died. I suppose this will happen more often as we all age, and it's never going to be easy news. But my friend didn't hear about it from a third party, or overhear it, or get an email. She was on the road, in his city, trying to get in touch, just to meet up. He wouldn't respond to messages. Then she saw his Facebook wall light up with condolences and had to draw her own conclusions.

No information on circumstances. No consoling messenger. No discussion, no human touch. She had to find out by eavesdropping on electrons.

Our world is getting less human--at least the information is, undeniably so. We have always learned of death from gossip, or firsthand; but always, hasn't there been a human? Hasn't the message been less cruel?

I didn't know my mom's father very well. He played saxophone in San Fransisco night clubs and lived in a universe apart from my academic Pittsburgh childhood. He died when I was in college; I got the message, voicemail, from my mom. I listened to it twice, struck cold with the pain in her voice more so than the loss I felt myself. I remember sitting on the floor, against the window, after I heard, before I called her back; I sensed the loss, dimly, more regretting that I hadn't known him better than mourning his death outright. It was a very human feeling.

Not so, my interaction with the internet. Whether scrolling Facebook or chatting with an old friend in Gmail, these electrons fail to convince. Nothing in a screen can even replace the sound of a human voice; much less a quiet evening out back with a happy fire and a conversation blended well with silence.

I mourn the passing of our humanity, as we slide toward being little more than excuses for the great electron dance. And, too, I pity our future selves, which will be bound in our most human moments to such machines as we can only now imagine.

Amnsmyth

For a few years in college, I wrote a blog on Xanga.  As I recall, I stopped blogging because the password recovery email was a school-based email address, and once you graduate from school, they delete your email address.  I duly forgot my password, and that was that.  College kids everywhere, take note: your school email address, which you probably switched to in order to avoid using "b8rsk8r4evRR@yahoo.com" when emailing professors, will be unceremoniously ripped from your life shortly after graduation.  (Aware of this, of course, I then completely ignored my graduate school email account.  Turns out that's not a great idea, either.)

Anyway, after the blog's inane demise, I wrote in journals.  Then I wrote poetry.  Then I stopped writing altogether.

And then, one evening on the porch as an adult with a wife and a kid, I decided to look up the old Xanga site.  It's gone, of course, but the good old Wayback machine saved a lot of entries from about June 2006 up until the end in June 2007.

I like what I wrote.  I'm sad that a lot of it is gone.  I had some dumb moments, and more than one post was really more blather than thought, but the quality was actually a fair deal better than I cynically remembered of myself.  I had a pang of regret, knowing that there's really probably no way to get back those entries that are gone now--and then a pause.

I'm not dead, or whatever.  Sure, I've quit writing, and it will likely take some time before I write well again.  But I think it's time I quit quitting.  Writing was a significant part of my life, and I think its absurd that I've stopped.  I still do stuff, and I can write about it.

So there, foolishly-limited Wayback machine.  So.  There.  I'm going to create more internet with which to burden you.  Deal with it.

Introduction

What idylls and fantasies
lurk behind your widening eyes
flashing dark and curious
over the newborn Earth and I?



August 2014

That pause

That pause
when you review your angry scrawl
one muscle clench, a single nerve twitch
before the words and soul's erased--
this pause is reflection, certainty,
checking you mark before the strike:
Strike true.
No better anger ever was
that wasn't better left unsaid.



July 2014