Going to saddle up this old swaybacked blog. I'm gonna do it on an absolute daily basis, because after years of pretending that writing isn't all I want, I've now started trying to get things published. And it's a little bit working out, but not fast enough to keep the flickering whisper of flame alive. I've got to learn how to write, quickly, urgently, with both hands.
Right now, I've got a trickle of bland, policy-focused journalism flowing through the sluice, but the wheel turns only intermittently. It's not enough. Each time I get an assignment for a story, I'm bad at it. Each time, I'm filled with dread. Every assignment brings a brief torrent of horrified activity, a flood that damages more product than it mills. Every article terrifies me. Not a good sign. This is supposed to be what I want to be doing. What's the problem?
For one thing, I can't handle the fact that it's seen. The knowledge of Actual Readership is an intimidating drone of noise that constantly threatens to seize up everything and frequently does.
Another part of it is that the product I'm producing is practically sealed behind glass. I do the writing, but I don't get it. I mean, I get the issues involved, the ins and outs of the levers and gears and politics. I just don't know how to insert myself into the writing of it. The writing I've grown to know intimately well is this sort of stuff right here -- personal blogging into the windy sweeps of the open internet, formless and directionless, sprawling and insignificant as lichen. But a piece of policy-focused journalism is a complicated little machine of statutes and politics and accompanying connective tissue. Such assembly requires a glove box, hermetically sealed for everyone's safety, and devising the innards of these pieces is both delicate and dangerous work. I'm just as likely to contaminate the fragile end product with some pathogen heaved out on the damp airwaves of my dumb horse breath as I am to poison myself by inhaling the finished piece's offgas -- the volatile, noxious fumes of the real world, bureaucracies and business and other such polymers.
I want to do well. I very badly want to keep writing. I want to keep getting paid for it. But I can't spend all my time hunched over a glove box. The thing with the dread happens largely because the stakes seem so very high -- I don't get many more life chances after this, folks, that's my feeling -- but also because the precision of motor movement involved in such tinkering is so very cramping. There's nothing wrong with building machines, but I've got to spend at least as much time thrashing around and flailing all my limbs into tables of glassware. I don't want to be gloved up all the time. I want to reach my bare hands into horrible nightmare squirming things and brightly gleaming boxes of razoredged technology and dusty crumbling trunks filled with scraps of antiquated textiles. I want to construct lurching abominations from their constituent parts and set them loose to amble around. To do that, this is necessary, the blogging. I feel certain I won't be able to continue to coherently write about, say, teachers' insurance rate hikes if I don't also revive the practice of regularly plugging art I know nothing about and describing carpet and generally bitching about absolutely everything in the world.
Fuck death and abandonment and betrayal; fuck crippling regrets and nostalgia and the creeping entropy of age; fuck the sad insignificance of this place in the world and the nauseating horror of this time in the world; fuck insecurities about lack of money, kids, or coolness. I'm going to try my damnedest to regress this lichen growth right back to where it was sixteen months ago and evolve it from there onward. A daily lubricating shot of freeform writing is essential to keep the rotten, creaking wheel turning. Or plodding along. A daily handful of oats. This blog is a setting where I can mix up three pretty shitty metaphors in the space of a few hundred words, none of which I'm remotely familiar with -- mills, horses, laboratories -- and I can trowel on the utter bullshit as thickly as I want (and I can also use em dashes, a semicolon, and a parenthetical to torture the hell out of any coherent syntax). Why? Because it's fun, goddammit.
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