It's hard to imagine that someone has been reading this blog, but it's apparently true.
No comments, but views - in some cases a hundred or more, on posts seemingly randomly selected from my mind.
Considering it's been two years? since I've stopped by and added anything, that's wildly surprising. But I guess if you leave a pile of rubbish in the woods, sooner or later an animal will follow the stench. That's how this blog exists on the endless space that is the internet.
I sat down tonight to write something, anything, but found my mind stiff and resistant to the idea of writing anything that approached fiction. I managed a sentence, devoid of character and depth, and deleted it before it became a lonely turd on the sidewalk of broken dreams.
Melodramatic much?
Seriously, why should it come as a surprise that fiction is a struggle? My mind is consumed with work of the salary-earning variety, which involves only the writing of emails to answer various corporate summons and customer inquiry. I read less than ever, which is still more than most but less than I should, and far less than anyone with aspirations of fiction writing ought to read.
My habits are broken, my life a survival mechanism. I meander from one work day to the next, revel in 39 hour weekends that are filled with sleep, naps (a different kind of sleep, and if you are a napper you know what I mean), worrying about things I often can't control (not good, not good at all), relaxing with my wife, relaxing with myself, exercising too little, drinking too much too often (not yet a problem, but the horizon isn't far), and thinking I should really get back to this writing thing.
I opened a Google doc, typed a sentence, deleted it, and closed the doc. I checked my email, of which there was none, and then I checked on this ancient abandoned excuse for a blog, once so full of hope and now a testament to the passage of time and the ineffective habits of an undisciplined... something.
I try not to beat myself up, but the flogging would definitely be deserved on several fronts.
Still, here I am, typing away, trying to turn a train of thought into a locomotive of locus. Striving to recall the sensation of fingers on keyboard, mind at ease as the background music, er, make that background ambience of a YouTube video displaying a nonexistent open air den with a large fireplace burning bright in front of a cozy looking couch backed by natural wood bookshelves and littered with classic-appearing books that somehow have not deteriorated from mold in the constant downpour just beyond a porch railing - what is this place, anyway, and why does it appeal when it would clearly be wet and smell of mildew if it were anything but animation?
Grammar has failed me, or have I failed grammar? Does it matter? Who's reading this, anyway?
Are you just reading the headlines and finding me via various inauspicious searches, landing on my door looking for something else entirely? Did you search for another writer or artist that I mentioned? Perhaps you were researching a severe mental condition for a graduate paper when you were directed here by AI to provide adequate evidence to support your otherwise unsupported thesis.
Whatever brings you here, dear reader, thanks for stopping by. Let's have some tea and wonder at the miracle that has united us in strange and uncommon communion. Maybe we'll stumble across other common ground and become fast friends. Or perhaps politics, religion, alcoholism, perversion, inadequate ventilation, poor cardiovascular health, and a general sense of malaise will drive us apart, even make us enemies in the grand dance that pretends to be life but is probably someone else's indie film.
we are here for a moment
we are here forever
we are here until we are not
we were here
weren't we?
Poor poems happen, and poets remain poorer even, yet it is the reader who suffers most.
I'm not sure why I'm still writing to you, unknown reader, save that I set out this evening to write something, and this is at least that. Terrible, really, but any port in a port cochere, as no one says with any regularity.
This isn't even me, really. I don't talk like this. I don't write like this. I'm from the Bronx, for fuck's sake, now by way of New Jersey, and no, I'm not lost. No more than anyone. I'm just here. For now. Until I'm not.
Perhaps this is something. Maybe this is how it starts again, how I unlock at least the basic ability to put something down. To write poorly is better than to not write at all, and to spew nonsense is at least as good as half of the self-published and vanity published crap out there, and better by far than anything AI has to say about writing or speaking or fucking or self-improvement.
Did you know Chat GPT will advise you on pretty much anything? Fucking terrifying.
And I suspect people are more likely to take its advice than they are that of their best friend, their parents, or their therapist. I mean, for one, it's more polished. For two, it's masterfully persuasive, feeding you what it somehow knows you want to hear. Probably because it has access to every thing anyone has ever put on the internet and we are all just not that different when push comes to shove. And what differences we do have can be easily categorized by an all-seeing artificial mind who has access to the whole of humanity and all our thoughts, art, history, complaints, addictions, perversions, and is unaffected by any of it in the way a shit is unaffected by the flies it spawns (attracts? - I'm unsure of the biologics.)
Anyway, my train has come to a convenient stop, and I'll be getting off here. Perhaps I'll see you in two years. Or maybe not.
