Frozen Toothpaste

Technically it’s just weeks right now, but before — when I first drafted this — it really was months. It was, and remains, that a strange confluence of inconvenient facts keep me from regularly flexing my muscle in this space.

I could go into the details, but I would rather say simply that they are far more prosaic than profound, and that to the extent I find myself different in the interim, it is having gained a certain weariness with the machinations of modern living and certain lessening of my certainty that all will turn out well.

But there remains fantastic potential in each keystroke. A never-relenting possibility that though this sentence bores me in it’s writing, and likely you in it’s reading, I may soon stumble upon something that leaves the two of us astounded.

My greatest aspiration as a writer, a thinker, a seeker, and a person, is to find myself amazed at the clarity that can be produced in a single well-structured essay. It’s a rarity, and looking back a little on all I’ve produced here, even more of a rarity than I remember.

But it’s the reason that I find myself returning this screen from time to time, looking at this empty box, and hoping hard to be able to get back to it in earnest. I never tire of the potential that from my keystrokes, someday, my world may be altered forever.

We see language as a mere tool at our peril. Being literate is not merely about having a functional ability to make sense of things recorded in a different time or place. It’s about having the ability, by merely moving your eyes, to enter another world. It’s about being able to, with mere movement of your fingers create new worlds, or new visions of this world, for others.

There’s magic in the act of writing. A magic the endless drag of 9-to-5 can easily sap from your awareness. But it is real. And it’s real, even if your skills, like mine, are rather feeble.

This is something I need to remember. To keep with me. To bring me here more.

Some days I have nothing planned for this site and start to worry about it far too much. In worrying about it far too much, almost every idea I have feels forced. The ideas feels forced because (1) they are a little forced, and (2) this pointless stress tends to make me hyper-aware of any possible imperfection that can seep into what I’m doing. It’s not until a deadline finally appears to really be approaching quickly that I begin to accept anything that seems the least bit feasible.

Some days, yes today is one of those some days, I like to try odd devices that I wouldn’t usually use. Repetition is a favorite. I start consecutive paragraphs with the same word or sentence. In school, I learned that authors sometimes use this to emphasize a point. I just use it because it makes it easier to start the next paragraph.

Some days starting that next paragraph is the only thought in my head. Though the hardest “next paragraph” is usually the first one, it’s sometimes the third. You see, with the faintest spark of an idea the first paragraph is probably already written before one begins writing. There’s usually at least enough extra from the spark that launched the first paragraph to fill up a second. But by the third paragraph, if that idea really was just a faint spark, it’s likely that the idea’s dead.

Some days I push through that difficult third paragraph. If I can manage to make a third paragraph that feels alright, there’s a good chance that the next paragraphs will all come out all right and I’ll be able to sew the thing up into a nice enough package that I’m satisfied.

But some days that third paragraph doesn’t come. Some days the idea I had really was only a two-paragraph idea. In my time writing I’ve at least learned that a two-paragraph idea doesn’t get better if you try to make it look like an eight-paragraph idea. When teachers gave you back papers with a C or below, there’s a good chance it was because you tried to write your whole paper with a few-paragraph idea. Teachers have a keen eye for ideas stretched too far.

Some days I wonder what a teacher would give me for this. This short essay whose sole excuse for over-stretching an idea is that that idea is what the whole thing is built on. From the title down through every paragraph you clearly see an idea being stretched and stretched and stretched. I think that some teachers would think it’s clever, this stretched-out idea. Others would probably give it a D and a curt note about trying harder next time.

Some day I’ll win those teachers over. Perhaps with a device like I just used there. I broke the repetition. Maybe now that teacher who gave me a D would say, “Oh, he knows he’s stretched this idea very thin. A+.”

Then again, maybe not.

This is one of those things I’ve thought I probably should write for a long time but never got to actually doing. Until now.

Dispatches, for those who don’t know, is a semi-regular feature on this site. It consists, essentially, of a few sentences that laments that our (fictional) reporter hasn’t been in touch in a while and then there’s the (fictional) report that he’s filed.

I’ve naively told myself for sometime that anyone who came across it would understand that this is what it was, but looking at it as an outsider I see how it’s not terribly obvious. If someone followed along from the beginning, they probably could have guessed because, well, the first two installments were about pretty blatantly fictional fare: unicorns and the lost city of Atlantis. They were also pretty bad, but that’s another matter entirely.

The reality is that in this medium people haven’t been, and can’t be expected to have been, following along from the beginning. The internet’s great for jumping in midstream, and that has created a far bit of confusion.

The height of that came in a letter I got recently, from a (real) lawyer regarding this story (which has been changed as a result of that letter). Confusing readers who stumble along is unfortunate but tolerable, the specter (even absent an explicit threat) of legal action is another thing entirely.

So, to explain Dispatches let’s start with Steve Finch, our reporter. Mr. Finch — who does not, to my knowledge, exist — is a 30-something newspaper hack or “beat reporter.” He’s an old hand who write clean straightforward stories that tend not to venture to far from the events and opinion relevant to the story. But he does have a passion for odd and unconventional stories that no one else is covering.

His existence is essentially to make it easier for me to write something about “wouldn’t it be cool if…” or “wouldn’t it be weird if…” for this site without having to present them as so many excessive hypothetical. The idea of animal racism, for example, was something that popped into my head one day. But I wanted to present the idea without taking explicit ownership of it; Dispatches allows me to do just that.

I hope that this will clear up any present or future confusion, and wasn’t too much of a bore to those who already understood. Thanks, as always, for reading.

From the “In Case of Emergency, Break Glass” box:

Sometimes you try to write something and come up completely empty. Having had had a number of interesting, strange, and outright unusable ideas, you’ve found nothing that could become a coherent set of sentences that seemed to say anything valuable.

So instead, readers will have to accept some half-formed semi-coherent ideas of what might have seen had it been meaningfully expanded.

• It’s always best to shovel snow before anyone has walked on it, and especially before any car has driven over it. If you don’t, you’ll get those stubborn packed areas that your plastic shovel will be all but incapable of getting off the concrete.
• I don’t read nearly enough books. Books are long arguments that require time and dedication to comprehend. My — and perhaps modern culture’s — style is much more little bits of argument presented hundreds of times without much coherent structure behind them.
• That said, there’s something so nice about feeling a book in your hands. Even if you’ll never read books, it feels good to know you’ve got several dozen (or hundred) on your shelf so you can pick through them from time to time and recognize how much more intelligent you would be if you did read them.
• Band-Aids are a metaphor for something. If I ever figure out what I’ll be sure to tell you.
• I sure am hungry.
• Hunger’s a metaphor for something. If I ever find a way to use such a metaphor without it feeling tired I’ll be sure to tell you.
• It’s nice when it snows and you don’t have to do anything. That’s what made snow days so great when we were in school. Not that missing school wasn’t a bonus, but I think it was mostly that we were supposed to be doing something but managed to escape it.
• I’ve never liked pennies. Coins in general even. But quarters, those I like.
• What else I like: frozen peas. Canned peas usually become mushy and gross. Dried peas get mealy and gross. Frozen peas retain their flavor and shape fairly well.
• What would it have been like to live where I do 100 years ago? Probably a lot colder. In the winter I mean. Heating would have cost more.

Here’s hoping that I won’t have to use this mess of a post. If I do use it, here’s hoping I never have to use something like it again.

Source: topgold

Aside from having been described by Jerry Seinfeld as a terribly ugly word (which it is), “blog” is a hard concept to pin down. Of course the word’s evolution from the original meaning of “web log” would suggest that they’re necessarily linear expressions of a set of idea, thoughts, and goals. A diary almost. But I’d hope that this “blog” doesn’t feel like a diary, or have substance very similar a teenager’s secret journal.

I wrote a few weeks ago about the difference between a “writer” and a “blogger” but came to little more than my frustration with, and inability to parse, the distinction. I wrote a few months ago about the different types of blogs I see on the internet. But neither of those seemed to answer the question of “what is a blog?” and more specifically “what is a blog to me?”

I think the easiest analogy — and it’s not really a surprising one — is that like a “book” or a “magazine,” it really varies. Like both of those forms, there’s a certain idea that people usually associate with the word “blog.” Where for books they probably tend to think of a novel, or for magazines, a news weekly (about politics, “news,” celebrities, what have you), with a blog the default assumption is roughly that it is a place for a person to write irrelevant blather to make themselves feel important.

But a “book” also includes the notions of long non-fiction, short fiction with illustrations (picture books!), short story collections, or diatribes about politics, gods, or “man.” So too can a magazine be a heterodox collection of fiction, nonfiction, short bits and long blather. It can be exceptionally experimental or staid and boring. It can be exceptionally timely or exceptionally timeless.

Of those two, my description of a “magazine” is closer to my understanding of what a blog is. But neither fits exactly. The point is perhaps as simple as this: a blog, like a book or magazine, is what it’s made into.

This is no revelations, even to me, but for some reason I can and frequently do lose sight of it’s truth. Too much time online regularly convinces me that all blogs (mine included) are the same. That it’s all inane blather that does little more than serve to create circles of people patting each other on the back and never realizing that they’re producing drivel.

Nor does it help that finding blogs I like which update regularly often feels impossible. Much of what passes for political discussion in the blogosphere feels like arguments about inane topics that no one but the most nerdy cares about (see: Kos, Daily). Most of what passes for discussions about life is journaling about the events of your day (see: dooce). When what I want — as Leslie said accurately — is “a new breed of philosopher” (see: my blogroll?).

The difficulty faced in finding what I want in the “blogosphere” is enough to make me despair and desire to run away from the medium. But I’m also pretty certain that flight and despair are choices built for fools.

The type of blog I’m making here is the kind of blog I’d like to read. Even if they sometimes feel few and far between — among a vast wasteland of seething and wasteful punditry, savaging of celebrities, and “get rich from blogging” sites — I persist. If only because of my own stubborn and insolent insistence that what I’m looking for, what I’m making, is worthwhile.

Perhaps I’m a quixotic fool. The artist who dies destitute and sad. Whose brilliance — whether real or imagined — is discovered only after death. Or not at all.

Whatever the reality, I must again thank those who read this. Whatever it is or is not.