2:44am.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written. Just woke from a dream in which a woman is talking about writing with a fountain pen and how it is perfect for those times when you know what you want to write, and it is relatively short. Then I woke up and thought, I guess she prefers the more even, reliable flow of a modern pen for the hard work of just starting to write, when you don’t know what you want to say–or when you have a lot to say but you haven’t been saying it, so it’s backed up and clogged and things are going to get messy enough without adding a fountain pen into the mix. That’s what I thought–because I’ve never used a fountain pen, but I imagine they are messy.

Before: Corning “Shadowed Iris” (because the Internet has everything)

The past three days have been dark days–though yesterday not so dark as the previous two, being more recovery from the outrageous emotional indulgence of the previous two.Yesterday was supposed to be the day I would finally sit down and start writing (after finishing the semester early!), but it was a cleaning day instead and much needed. I unpacked and washed and put away a lovely 1940s-era set of dishes to replace the Corelle we’ve been eating on for 27 years (exactly, it so happens). Packing up the old, cleaning cupboards, putting in the new. It was good work and very gratifying to sit down to dinner with gleaming china on the table.

After: Pope Gosser “Blue Belle” (also because the Internet has everything)

But the the problem with not writing (or insert your own life/love), then setting a day when you’ll definitely get to it, is there’s always something else to be done, and the longer you aren’t writing, the easier it is to continue not writing, until, if you are like me, you have some truly nasty days. Dark descends and every thought turns negative despite valiant efforts to turn them to positive or even neutral places. The Destroyer awakens and walks, narrating my life until I am hating on it–my ideas are vain and insipid, my love is illusion, my joy is dust. Believe me, I can go a very long time without writing, especially if I am doing some other kind of creative work instead, but eventually I get clogged up, dried out, and start to forget why I want to stick around. Writing is the juicy fruit that sustains my life–it has been there when no other human has been able to be there. Woe be unto me if I don’t do it.

When I am writing–and by that I mean active, regular, daily writing–peace reigns in my world. Thoughts flow more consciously–I am more aware of what I am thinking and where it’s taking me. Ideas come freely from that mysterious place ideas and dreams and myths come. So why do I not write? It is easy to point to the daily grind–work, school, the odd yoga class, keeping house and home together…I tell myself all these things keep me from writing, but they do not keep me from writing. They are convenient excuses for not writing, because I damn well know that if I am inspired to write I will write, and housework and schoolwork will take a powder. There also have been long enough stretches in my life when external commitments were light or nonexistent and I didn’t write, so no, it isn’t busy-ness that keeps me from it.

I think it has more to do with calcification–the tendency for us to become stuck in patterns of habit. Habit and the comfort it provides.  We are born imitators–we imitate our parents, our peers, and the media. It’s a survival mechanism. Adaptation. We imitate ourselves, too, and this is also a survival mechanism. We learn how to do things so we don’t have to think about them anymore, which allows us to pay attention to other things. What if you had to think about how to drive every time you got in the car, how to cook an egg, how to make coffee? Imitation is so incredibly useful that way. But it also is a trap. We do it all the time and to greater and lesser degrees forget that we are imitating and take it for living. Autopilot, though.

Writing makes me not only think about what I’m experiencing instead of riding the rapids of my life and always looking out for the next bend or rock, but to precisely (and hopefully nonpompously as possible) put it into words that others can engage with. But I have to tell the truth to myself. Cut things when they are meaningless or just dull; realize that the words have no life because I’m summarizing instead of digging. You have to be fucking awake and not imitating yourself or someone else.

So that’s a big reason why I don’t write. I get calcified in my ways, droning it out because it is more comfortable, or it seems to be. Until I realize I’m doing the same things every day and feeling bleached out. My life is passing, and I’m telling myself I’m gonna do this thing that makes me feel alive on this day, after I’ve taken care of that, and that, and is this all there will ever be? Yes, it is. Yes, it damned well is because no one but you can get up and do the things you want to do, and if you don’t, then you won’t.

Back to the fountain-pen dream. It is nice to think about doing whatever it is you know you love doing, and it is nice to have pretty tools to do that with. But it is more important that you do whatever it is you want to do, with whatever tools are handy, in a half hour or fifteen minutes a day, than to dream about the perfect time and place when you will finally get down to work.

So here is my humble blog, supplemented by spiral-bound notebooks and scrap paper, pencils, and ball-point pens.