10 Reasons Why You Will Die If You Don’t Read This
The years since attending college for writing have passed so fast and slow, and if I had a nickel for every time I told someone I write and they asked me if I had a blog, well, I’d have at least ten bucks. What? That’s a shitload of nickels. But back then, it was a time when people sat down at their computers to read whole articles. They took the time to think about the information they wanted to receive, and they followed from that headline with a careful reading of those well written articles, and goddamnit, they learned something. I had nothing to add at the time. I scribbled whole notebooks full, filled floppy disks with chapters of angsty twenty-something heartbreak and rage and love, and it thrilled me to no end. Smartphones came along, and articles became lists of bottled-lightning information, now now now and gimme more, and the reasons I felt awe toward a finely penned piece of news got harder to find. Nuance has become a thing of the past. Listicles that you had better read or you will get the worst kind of ass cancer dominate the pocket screen. We’re just taking little hits to maintain our high. It’s your brain, do with it what thou wilt. I was bitter at twenty-five, and I sent off short stories, and folks kept asking, where’s your blog? Eleven years later, I still don’t have an answer.
The truth is, I’m lazy and scared. Everything about doing what I love is exhausting, and I never liked homework. Why take on more? I hate writing, but I love having written. If I don’t do it, I will betray the trust of a seven year old. I do it for the children. Don’t you see? Well, child. Okay, that child was me—I do it for myself. You got me. I’m selfish just like everybody else. I do it because that’s what I wanted to be when I grew up. It’s the same reason you became a ninja and some people are pirates; you can’t take it back once your seven-year-old self decides, and I know, I should have picked ghostbuster, because writing is religion. No one should decide to be a monk before they get laid at least twice. And when you see a Campbellian pattern in everything, see it in the mistakes you make, the constant repeating cycles of your life, you can’t let it go. It haunts and tempts me to break it, and I know I never will. It’s fucking beautiful, man.
So, why now?
Because, words keep coming out and I can’t stop putting them together. Oh, and the Coronavirus Pandemic has cursed me to stare at the blank page full-time. Life will slip by, slowly in the moment and fast in retrospect, and some memories are going to be bigger than others. Whole years of life will be defined by a single hour of one terrible night, and then later, five perfect minutes just before sunset. The years that pass, head down while I work hard to spend my lone day off staring at the wall, those are the years that pass unnoticed. I wonder how they all got away. Hairs in the sink, gray pubes, and surfacing veins in the back of my hands. Times like this quarantine are very rare in our lives. Tested or not, financially burdened or buried in remote work, this is a year that will not pass unnoticed by any of us. What act in our story is this? Was that time just before lockdown the proverbial ordinary world and all this time spent at home a road of trials? Seems boring. So, that would be why. It’s time to put things out there, whether they get read or not. This could be a dumping ground for thoughts or a place where things grow. Only one way to find out.
All those clickbait listicles and the long think pieces that have gone unread, all that headline culture run amok, it isn’t why I wouldn’t start doing this before. Those are the excuses I make to myself the same way assholes, once upon a time, used to brag they didn’t own a television. I’m not fooling anyone (or myself). It’s all that silly value I place on time, and only when it suits me, melancholy for years passed unnoticed. It’s because if I start something, I have to finish it, and these things are never done. I find that a terrifying prospect. But so is making anything that is worth even one shit in this life.
