Category Archives: writing

Birds singing

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Just posted this on BricksBrain.com:

For a writer I certainly don’t do a lot of writing anymore, then again I’ve never felt less epileptic in my life. Writing sets off epilepsy which creates more writing. The more the epilepsy, the more creative the writing. The more creative the writing, the more the epilepsy. The more the epileptic writing, the more the brain damage. Oops. Thus, sidelined, I just kick back and watch all the shit go down. These are marvelous times for watching the shit go down. Glorious times, even. Watching history happen from our little urban forested haven. Lots of time to read and watch old movies. The less the epilepsy, it turns out, the more the reading. I’m wending my way though stacks of turgid volumes. Don’t even ask. The constant writing in my head got in the way when I was trying to read. It’s good to have the fountain of words turned off. I can listen to people now and not rewrite what they are saying. I can listen to music now and not hear it as writing. I can look at the landscape and not see it as stories. I can listen to birds sing and not hear language. I just hear birds singing.

Note to a poet who don’t know it

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If you aren’t doing so already you might wanna set yourself up a WordPress blog (they’re free, but your own domain will cost $18/yr, about three slices of the San Francisco pizza you posted so eloquently about) and after you spill your essays onto Facebook you can cut and paste them onto your blog. Instant posterity. It’s a shame to let pretty writing disappear into the Facebook quicksand. Your FB page is probably a goldmine of long forgotten gems just like the pizza one. Writers never write just one thing. The slightest thing, cold pizza even, brings forth a geyser of words. Look at me, we display like wanton birds of paradise, I can write like a motherfucker.

Of course, most people can’t write worth shit. They talk beautifully but get stiff and amusical putting it into prose. Writing, like just about anything else, involves a certain amount of innate skill, one that’s not yet an inborn human trait. Hell, writing itself is only 5,000 years old and the vast majority of people and their genomes who have ever lived and made babies never knew how to write anything. Wait a hundred generations or so—kids will be born writers. But natural selection won’t help people stumbling through paragraphs today. Look at them on Facebook, the poor bastards. They wax about as eloquently as I played the drums. In the meantime the ones who can write well ought to have their words preserved, if only for the sheer fuck of it.

You’re a writer, deal with it, embrace your inner egomaniac who knows that every word you put in prose is literature. You may not think so but the little twerp of a writer inside us thinks so. He’s in there, the little fuck, scribbling and scribbling, hoping someone will notice. Let him blog away so the other blogging twerps will find him. Dude, they’ll say, I really enjoy your writing, and you’ll smile and never tell anyone how cool that feels.