“So let’s go to bed at two. Count the pages three, not once.” – R.E.M.
So that was two posts yesterday — technically, two in one night, as I wrote both of them between sunset and sunrise. Another first. What in the world is going on with me?
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Oh wait; I think I know. I also think I really can’t say. Lots of vagueness and misdirection lately. I’m sorry. I know cryptic is only fun if you’re in on the joke, and I know almost none of you are in on the joke here. (Not that it’s even a joke.) I can’t promise that’s going to end soon, so if this isn’t your thing, you might want to back away for a while. Maybe check back around post +75 or +100? (Which, at this accelerating rate, might be sometime next week. Har har.)
I warned Witt that now that I’ve done seven in a month, and then seven more in a week, clearly the next thing to try is for seven posts in a single day. As if that would be good for anybody, including me! Or as if the quantity or frequency of posts matters at all. (Particularly comsidering how each one is an arbitrary length, and that there are zero standards for how much effort or insight go into each atomic bit. All the parameters aretotally subjective, and I’m the entire editorial board. Just me.)(This might all be hot garbage, but it’s my hot garbage.)
That said, I do seem to be veering closer to that kind of output, which is bonkers — especially to my old tw@se-one-post-per-week sensibility. I used to think once a week was overkill, and often struggled to think of anything to write about. And not only a bonkers target to shoot at, but I’m also genuinely concerned that if I tried to do 7-in-1, those 24 hours might break my brain. It’s got this gnarly crack running from one lip all the way through the base and half way up the other side as it is; stained with coffee from long use, it even creaks a little if you press on it. I’m gonna keep it in circulation, because I hate to set a favorite item retired up to a high shelf, or quarantined behind glass like it’s a precious heirloom. (Also, I can’t really afford another one right now, and I’ve heard that the lease terms on those things are freaking murder.)
[I really hate this impulse to draw attention to my own jokes — it’s so needy and dull; as if “needy and dull” weren’t already kind of the top hashtags for a personal blog to begin with, ugh! But, sorry, I really did make myself chortle a little at that one about my brain.]
(And these excessive parenthetical asides are just fucking painful — gah! Let it go, man! I mean, it’s like a hat on a hat on a hat. Absurdity with extra sprinkles.)
(Me again: sorry, but I have to do some of these because I haven’t yet put in the reps to work in footnotes here in wp-admin/ land… and I miss them like a dead brother. Also, I know it makes Witt mental to realize that I’ve stealthily tucked in more edits and stuff in an already-“finished” post. And making him mental is one of my greatest joys in this wretched suck hole of an existence, so I’ve just gotta, gotta do it.)
More seriously, writing that much — seven a day would be practically live-blogging the whole thing, at my pace — would definitely prevent me from getting anything else done — and probably whack out my wake/sleep cycle even further — and I really need to get some anything else (almost everything else) done.
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Well friends and future enemies, by the light of a new day (or, now that I’ve lain awake most of another night, I guess I should say that it’s by the light of the next afternoon, now), yesterday still seems pretty unreal. Like: if it transpired that I’d hit my head and hallucinated the entire thing, I would not be shocked. Some of my dreams — both the sleeping and waking kind — are pretty fucking weird.
I have a deep, deep, deep — did I say how deep it is? — suspicion of things that seem too good to be true. I guess that goes with the territory when you’re a lapsed optimist. My hard-won lessons of barns falling and babies crying all night and clay dreams unraveling and losing the chance to poison young minds with my view of the magical world of pottery and unbuilt kilns and all the rest — those lessons practically scream from my DNA when random, unexpected good things happen.
{And this from someone marinating in the highest privileges of first-world luxury. (I was going to use the trope “first-world problems”, but these things don’t even rank as problems. As I’ve said before elsewhere, in that context, my whole worldview is practically defined by anti-gratitude. Proof that my/our instinctual desires run to fathomless depths. No excuse; just noting that I’m aware.}
So I think: surely something will come along to fuck this up. It’ll probably all get crushed by the next turn of the big wheel in the sky, or the gods of Olympus who skewer our fates for sport. Or, since all of this is based on my limited perceptions and unintended but severe biases and propensity to let my expectations run out way too far ahead of the pack, it seems likely that even if the facts as I know them now run true, they will somehow twist in such a way that what seemed like salvation morphs into some kind of purgatory.
Not sure if I really mean that or I’m just flailing around melodramatically for attention. [Good alternate tag line for this blog: Just flailing around melodramatically for attention.]
Do I really believe that it’s not possible for simply random, good things to happen to me anymore? That seems like defensive pessimism taken an order of magnitude too far — doesn’t it?
OK, so am I gonna tell you what happened? Yes. Now? No. Sorry, dudes; still too soon. It’s a fluid situation; one of those Xeno’s Schrodinger’s Occam’s kind of things, where if I approach it wrongfooted or look at it too closely or try to slice it apart into binary pieces, I risk contaminating the experiment.
And yes; all this turmoil in one half of my life is making it awfully difficult to get moving in the other half this week. Thursday was a mess — just a pathetic little run of cups; Saturday was a mess — aimless wandering in circles, thousands of words on paper, but I did trick myself into starting to load the first bisk, which is usually how it has to go; my conscious mind won’t let go of wet season that easily, but sooner or later that weather’s gotta change. When I’m even a little out of sorts like this, I find so many convenient excuses to procrastinate longer in the house, at screens and keyboards and controllers and notebooks and naps, instead of heading out to that faded blue building and facing my fears. Let’s go, kid. Time to face some fears. Go go go.
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“Gardening at night just never works.”