Random Write #1

When you’ve just got to get right down into it, the meat of the matter, with all the passion and fire and flame that is in your heart, and ignore the literary devices and the spelling, and even, if there isn’t a word for it, invent that word, just get it down, recreate that experience for someone, that’s what I want to do.  But now I’m starting to believe that’s impossible. 

There was a time when I was pretty good at writing; I felt what I wrote, in a way I haven’t been able to recreate for a long couple of years, the words just flowed out and they felt right to me.  But lately they’ve been trickling out in diseased dribbles, and now I know why--it’s because I’ve let my head get in the way of what I care about.  I try to be like this writer or that writer and try this and add this subtle thing in here and how about that and there should be a connection here and it all tangles into a knot and I get frustrated and lose confidence--and once the confidence is lost everything is lost.  You have to believe,  down in the fucking bottom of whatever nugget you think is your soul, that what you’re writing is worth bringing into the light of the world.  If you don’t believe that with some kind of unconscious faith, it’s doomed before it’s even begun.  

But fuck writing about things man.  Get out there and just experience it.  The shoddiest experience is, in a way, better than the best writing.  You string some words together and because your brain has been trained to understand them as a complex series of thoughts, it may send shivers down your spine, but to see something, to feel it and understand  it instinctually, deep down in your gut, that will just send you over the edge and down the rabbit hole.  The Queen of Hearts may chop off your head, but the main issue is just to go and to see things as they are and disregard the consequences as they are all just part of the overall experience of living.  

Here’s the thing.  I might write the best description in the world of an exciting hitchhiking trip through the French countryside, and you, my hopefully savage and not at all gentle reader, may sit down and read that description, and despair along with me in your mind, and feel the wind of Peugot after Peugot passing me on the highway, and I might tell you in vivid detail about the sunset that streaked the sky insane colors of orange and purple and velvet blue, and describe the scent of fresh grass and exhaust, and how my pack cut into my shoulders and we were already tipsy off a bottle of one euro wine and the world was a beautiful place that afternoon, though it took an hour to get a ride.  I can tell you how we laughed and laughed at jokes that weren’t funny and counted the smartcars that went by just because they are such a novelty back in the states.  

But.  You weren’t actually there.  You didn’t experience the spontaneous emotions, bursts of thought, and every slow-ticking second of that time.  You only have the picture that I’ve painted you, a picture that, no matter how many details I add, will necessarily miss something.  I here am leading you to think and experience a specific thing, a specific moment in time, that while it might be powerful (I don’t know, is a made-up description of two people waiting for a lift powerful?) is no substitute for the actual spontaneity of what will arise from a real event happening.

And then I don’t know.  Writing is just different from real life, you shouldn’t mistake the one for the other, but everything’s just a big game anyways until the last hurrahs, so suck up whatever you can out of life, whether it be sunsets or gang rapes or descriptions of pirate ships in shoddy romance novels or studying one species of plant for your entire career or making a career out of bartending in every continent of the world.  Whatever it is, just take it into that big lump of gray matter inside your frail little skull and appreciate it and let it change you and then, and then, go out and have fun.  I’m still pondering the divide between fiction and reality.