dog-pee-dog world

i joked today that i cleaned our dog's toilet. i did not write. 'there's other stuff.' there's always other stuff. i could have, i guess. but writing seemed so selfish. it wasn't getting gifts together, wasn't saying hi to my sister. plus, i had come back home with a 30 minute timer on the dog bedding that i'd have to turn around and get to at the laundromat. everything else besides writing seemed so short. moving a piece of furniture 7 feet. clearing the stairs since our cat was now stuck on the ground floor. turning on my pc, sitting, staring at the screen seemed like an eternity. i have perfected the art of making writing take a long time to do nothing. im sure other's have too, so it's not even a rare perfected art. little did i know it'd need a few more minutes. the bedding. it was still a bit damp when i got it home, but i think it's ok. our dog will piss on it anyways. hopefully he'll make it to the weekend. i just washed his bedding on saturday, so at current trends, he'll fall just short.

at lowe's they forgot me, it's ok, i would too. i had purchased some propane and waited and waited and waited outside. i didn't know who to bother after like five or six minutes, so i thought about leaving, even though i spent $21. nobody had come to swap out my tank. nobody would come, right? i started to panic. i must look silly just standing here. it's ok to leave. i leave a lot of things that i can't do. it would have been one more thing. it just wasn't the night. next time, i'd have to buy a new tank and replace one. it'd be like $70, plus the $21 wasted earlier. $90 anxiety. i guess that's the price we pay.

write a little write a lot

ten minutes every day is 70 minutes a week. that's a lot. that's more than an hour in one day. but if you miss a day then it's 20 minutes on one day. miss two and it's 30. and you will miss days. you have to. you can't write every single day. who can? but you can not write. you can go days or weeks without writing. that's easy. and then it's inertia, habit, discontent, whatever. just ten minutes. fifteen seems so aggressive but that really adds up, 105 minutes a week, almost two hours. im writing now. it's my obligation. i want to be a writer, right? i want to do this. i can't write stories anymore because i said what i wanted to. i can't write blog posts anymore because i said what i wanted to. the ideas don't really just come into my head. all my stories ended up the same after a while, after avoiding that for so long. maybe 2020 will be the year all my blog posts are the same, if they aren't already. i thought about writing something really off the wall to see what happened. i've never written fantasy before. it seemed like a good idea. then i looked at this screen and nothing happened, and i logged into blogger, and this did. maybe i'll come back to it. just like i come back to so many things. i don't come back to them.

it's ok, right? i've written 3 blog posts in the last week. they're all sitting in my drafts, saved, waiting for me to think they're good to go, waiting to finish them, peppered with a few notes each of what i'd like to add, ready to eventually sink down the queue list. that's assuming i write more. maybe now they'll sit there at the top, nothing else to replace them, unpublished, forgotten, fading away. now that's a high school existentialist's ending if i ever knew one.

all the light is gone

we didn't know what we were getting into. over 900 feet up in less than a mile, steep rock walls spider-walked across, cold wind wiping across us in october, 2700 feet above sea level at the apex in oregon. eugene is splayed out below us in the ever encroaching darkness as a series of glittering lights. out there are more white people with dreads than the rest of the west coast. at the top, several dogs sit at attention, several people take photos. i find a small little pathway around the edge of the summit, a crooked tree seems to beckon me in; around the corner, someone lights up a blunt, i have stumbled into their nature reserve, i walk out embarrassed.

the walk back down is the 'easy' route, but the rapidly increasing darkness renders the less steep surface every bit as unknowable, occasional stone steps and divots provide all the obstacle needed. the park is open for a bit longer but it might as well not be. we pass nobody on the way down and nobody passes us, the crowd at the top seems to have dispersed into air, there were surely still people up there when we began our descent.

half way down the obstacles grow wings. small objects dart at our face only to ditch impact at the last second, constant, constant, constant. the bats could be showing off their echolocation, or maybe just seek to scare us from their home. it becomes almost surreal how frequent they dive and then rise at the last possible moment. like a storm at about 6 feet above ground.

the path has become flatter now, railroad ties line the dirt path flattened by years of feet. the sunlight heaves one last sigh unto the world and disappears entirely. a flashlight on the end of my phone is all that can show us the way. but there is a different light up ahead. for a brief moment, i wonder if it is the end of the road, the lights  back at the portable toilets and maps and parking lot. it is not the end. it is a bench in front of a swamp. on the bench sit two people, completely and utterly still. they could be statues. they could be ghosts. a lantern sits on the ground next to them. the bats continue but seem to avoid them and them alone, as if a small protective dome surrounds the two figures. there is no talking, no breathing. i do not see them move. in embarrassment i peel my eyes away. it is pitch black. the park closes in 45 minutes. i wonder what it is to them. a date, a getaway, a quiet place, a haunting. i steal one last glance at the bench when i am 50 feet past. i have gone around a bend. all the light is gone.

today i am writing some words

today i am writing some words. i don't do it very often. or maybe i do all the time. it's hard to say. i am told that writing anything means i am writer. i tell myself sometimes that's not true. and then i lose the debate. i write work emails 5 days a week. they are dishonest. i format them to have the exact amount of punctuation necessary to express an air of timidness. but not too much. i have to seem passive and weak to those above me but still capable. every email ends with "Thanks!" some times i am not asking for anything, so in order to squeeze in my "thanks," i ask them if there's anything they need, and then thank them for the opportunity to offer me what they need.

i am a terrible writer. but i am a better writer. better than i was. the time i most improved my writing was about from age 20 or so to age 24 or so. during that time i abstained from fiction, which was my passion, and mostly toiled away at the occasional anime review. i read one of them for the first time in a long time awhile back. it was terrible. it wasn't even a review. it was a spoiler intensive analysis of some sorts that repeated a lot of clumsy turns of phrase and words. 28 of 32 people found the review helpful.

when i came back to fiction writing i wrote better stories, insomuch as they were a bit fuller and more interesting. for a few years i made somewhere around 60-70 submissions to literary magazines and short story contests. 0 of the people found them helpful. i had the stories critiqued by other people who were doing the same thing i was doing, and in turn, improved the stories to a point where 0 people found them helpful.

the two years i've written the most in my life were 2007 and 2015. in 2007 i was depressed and self harming in my college dorm room when i wrote a 52000 word novel about a depressed and self harming person living in an apartment. he died. in 2015 i was depressed and self harming in my bedroom when i wrote 113 blog posts and a handful of short stories. i am no longer self harming and this year i might write 25 posts at best. i don't know what this means.

today i am singing in the car. i am not a singer. i sing every day. i write every day. i am not sure what i am. maybe that's the gist of it. maybe until i find who i am i can't find what to write. i think i will never find what to write then, and that is ok, because i am not sure anyone does. if stephen king found the end of the road, perhaps he would stop writing books.

the other day i wrote to a friend what i thought about star wars. it was no different really than what i had said in the car the night previous. maybe i was transcribing. maybe that's all i do. i see stories not in words or characters but in scenes and moods. i see a movie scene and then write it. i feel a feeling and write it. maybe that's why i used to be so attached to the idea of writing screenplays. i could skip all the filler, all the narration. building a world is like drawing, and i am no good at the latter. it'd be better if everyone could just see it and then i could write what the people inhabiting it need to say. i don't have the patience for a middle, for describing the things and places and sounds. i consider the middle everything but the first and last paragraph or scene. some consider me a few years away from middle age. it sounds ridiculous but i am 38 to 39% of the way there. to the last paragraph.

most days i wonder if i should write more words. i wrote my first story in 1st grade. if i really want to then why don't i? there are things. there are always things. i don't think i can write a novel. i think i can write short stories. so for now i should focus on writing the things i can. but i haven't written a short story in years. so maybe i can't do that. thomas would be very mad at me.

this blog could be empty. words inhabit the pages but for all intents and purposes they don't, because it is such a small, insignificant thing. every minute sees 400 hours of video uploaded to youtube, and an ungoldy amount of words and blog posts to an ungodly amount of websites. i think occasionally how the internet is bigger than the earth we inhabit in a way. i can fly to the farthest geographical point from my living room in half a day. i can not begin to imagine what the equally representative occurrence of that would be online.

today i am writing some words. i don't know if i will write some more soon or not. 3 emails sit unread. a blog post counter shows a small number increase by one. i format this post to be impersonal, neglecting grammar rules and formalities to make it seem disarming, distant, sardonic instead of simply dark. i mentally offer a "thanks" to any readers. the opportunity was all mine.

hot hot heat

it's a 100mg thc orange cream soda. serving sizes are something you are not familiar with. it's not a bowl or bong or blunt, it's a soda, how bad can it be? it tastes like orange creamsicles, just a faint hit of it at the end, of something more. the hotel room is drab but it is brightened by her. you are about to take a swig and she stops you, use the shot glass, it's what was recommended. she always looks out for you. one shot, and then half a chocolate, also that hint of grassiness at the very end. lie down. lie down. lie down. nothing, and then everything. the tv is funny. it's all funny. and then it's her hands. they're always warm but now they are hot. your skin is scalding from the touch. you think for a second how wild it is your mind can convince you something is happening that is not, her hands are not irons. your body shakes. and shakes. and shakes. it's all ok, though. the rental car is damaged, the food is fast, the traffic is furious, the drug's too strong, but it's all ok. you have her. you have her. you have her. what's one night too stoned in amidst a lifetime in love? earlier in the night you were so upset, so anxious. the heat from her hands melts it away. you don't know when you fall asleep.