Moody Old Blog Post Drafts
Cohost is shutting down, which is really sad. These are our financial realities, I guess. Turns out I had a few things kicking around in my drafts, this one I’ll post verbatim. (I am in a better place now, uh, don’t worry.)
It feels like nothing is worth writing about, except fiction.
I don’t know anything. I’ve lived for an embarrassingly short amount of time and have embarrassingly little to show for it. The things about me that are interesting are covered much better elsewhere.
I don’t learn anything. By that, I mean that I don’t study anything. Research anything. What new knowledge comes into my mind, gets there by accident. I need to know something for work — a thing that is common knowledge in the industry, or at least in the particular sub-section of the industry that I work in. Thus, I know things. My mind is filled with computer trash.
Not, of course, to say that I have anything nearing the amount of computer trash stowed up there to have something to say about it. I’m a passive observer. I don’t do “big projects.” I don’t do much of anything, really.
The past year of my life resembles nothing so much as a loop. A routine I didn’t consciously choose. I fell into it, the same way one falls in with ‘the bad crowd.’ It was, and is, the default. Trying to do something else feels like climbing out of a pit lined with PTFE, and slick with silicone personal lubricant.
Words haunt me. They fall out of me in conversation, twisting into turns of phrase. I shape them into pleasing constructions, wisps of smoke that curl up into whorls and spirals. But I don’t have anything to say. I just need to put them somewhere.
I’m finding that the more I live, the less I believe in anything. The future is shrouded in clouds of uncertainty and a general sense of decline. There is little solace to be found in learning about the world. The land I occupy was taken by force, an injustice in living memory that remains unameliorated.
You can see imperialism and colonialism everywhere, if you look. (Because it is everywhere, not because of some perceptual illusion.) I can take 10,000 online courses on Japanese, French, or Spanish. It’ll be years, maybe decades until hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ makes it into the realm of the entry-level MOOCs. Finding a good or even reasonably-complete dictionary for the language is, so far as I can discern, an open research question.
Words still haunt me, so I write fiction. I’m told people like the fiction I write. It’s cultural trash: fanfiction. The pulp of the day. That’s fine, I’m not here to do anything important. I write for the joy of writing it. Even then, I can’t keep it up — the real work of writing is the real work in any creative pursuit: Staying the course. I feel pathologically unable to commit to anything. At time of writing, it has been 66 days since I updated my story, marked as “Ongoing” on the forum to which it was posted.
I’ve read profound nonfiction. At its best, it reveals another perspective on the world. Sometimes a whole new body of knowledge, other times an experience I could never have except through the words of others. Essays that make me reconsider issues from ‘dogs’ to ‘college admissions essays’ to ‘language acquisition.’
I feel I don’t have anything to reveal. I have no new bodies of knowledge. So, what profundity lurks within my perspective? What is the ‘good stuff,’ that which is unique to me? Easy: the nasty memories.
I don’t want to write about the nasty memories. What remains? What do I write? How?
The answer is probably something like, “Suck it up, live life, read about diverse subjects and form well-thought-out opinions. Express them.” So I should do that.
Step two seems hard, though.
