Contributions to Humanity

Writers like to play games even more than poker players. I say this because I came to my desk a minute ago with the fierce urge to pee but said to myself, oh no buddy, you aren't peeing a drop until you get at least 1000 words. Years ago when I called myself a smoker I'd say in my head, you can have a cigarette only once you figure out what this poem is about, plus get one good line. Because I never figured out what either of those things meant--ever--I rarely smoked, which is great and I don't miss it. Look at my teeth smile, look at my face shine.

And I account for the veracity of this writing analogy because I spent the last hour watching the final table of the 2009 World Series of Poker, and most of those guys just seem to hate the game, or at least are totally bored by it. Phil Ivey, probably the best poker player in the world, ate an apple as he watched his all-in ace/king go down to a fucking ace/queen when a queen came on the river. Brock and I were sick watching such a bad beat, but Phil finished his apple, put the core in his pocket, and walked out of the tournament: just like that.

Writing is wearisome, but weary in the way that makes you feel guilty for not doing real work. Like, if you have the luxury of even saying you're weary while typing in a blog you've got no cause for complaints. Even as I'm writing I'm remembering the scene from the fantastic baseball movie Bull Durham in which the Tim Robbins character plays the guitar on the team bus traveling to their next out-of-town game. To prove how just sad and tired he is by the cold, cruel world of Triple A baseball, he begins to sing Otis Redding's "Try A Little Tenderness." Only instead of singing the opening lines about young girls getting weary, the Robbins character sings, "Young girls, they do get wooly..." The scene is funny because this character, the team pitcher, is probably the best in the league, only he doesn't have the common sense to know what to do with his talent, so he bemoans his fate in Triple A . Plus he gets everything in life besides pitching wrong: he doesn't eat right, drink right, love right, fuck right, and he doesn't even know the lyrics to "Tenderness." It's like by assuming he'll always get everything wrong, he wills himself to actually do so. Sad sap.

In life I feel a lot like the Robbins character (who is by the way lyrically named Nuke LaLoosh). At all times I have the simultaneous feeling of holding down deep some unsung talent for this art while also being good at absolutely nothing. Not just at writing, no. I mean I feel bad at driving and running and teaching and inspiring and leading and following. Fuck man, I mean I don't feel good at thinking most days. I'm reminded of my father, who had to get my mother to screw in lightbulbs. I feel unfit for shoe-tying.

Perhaps Nuke's line of women getting wooly is more than a glorious malapropism, perhaps it is beautiful and true. Tonight I feel not weary. I'm wooly. These words I'm typing are slow to come, get stuck in the cobwebs covered by my brow bone, plus the internet's on the fritz and after every fourth sentence I get the spinning blue circle telling me to hold up, wait a minute, can't type now (just got another one of those bastards). And so far I've lost four eyelashes to this blog.

The good thing about writing professionally (reminder to self and others: this is not just a hobby, this is not just a protracted email to myself, this is hopefully someday going somewhere) is rejection comes slow. If you submit at all, which I don't yet, you won't know for weeks or months if what you wrote was accepted by someone. And the prolonged submission time period means that maybe, just maybe, someone is considering your work seriously, so that when the inevitable rejection slip comes in the mail you still may have won: someone has read you and maybe likes you. Acceptance may have occurred in a foreign heart if not the page. (Another reminder: once I start submitting, I'm going to keep all this faux-wisdom in mind.)

The bad thing about writing a blog is that no comments equals bad, because it means no one has read or the words they did read didn't matter. I stupidly installed boxes marked Funny! Interesting! Cool! only to have them perpetually unchecked. I'll go ahead and admit I checked off an Interesting! box a few blogs ago because the brave unmarked little soldiers of boxes looked so lonely there, stalwart almost. This is what I've reduced myself to--marking myself off as Interesting! not because I mean it, but because no one else has. Because I feel sorry for empty boxes.

But there is a reason I'm writing in this format and it's time to figure out what that reason is. Yes, it's nice to know that my close friends read what I write and like it. What really compels me about this blog business though, is something so simple I'm almost embarrassed to admit it: I like the screen I'm typing in.

Let me make a comparative analysis by first saying that writing in Microsoft Word sucks. Maybe because I'm so used to that format: the white, perfectly-sized 8x11 page with the slick blue in the background. It's my modern-day version of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's yellow wallpaper--it drives me fucking batty. When I wrote pre-blog it would be usually in one of my hundred fancy notebooks, but more than likely a yellow legal pad my mom swiped from her office at work. First drafts there, then typed into the awful Word for even more awful revision time.

Now let me tell you about the beauty of writing in this new blog mode. First of all it's mostly white with a thin gray box around my words, surrounded by acres of snow white. Just logging into Buggy Face and clicking New Post gives me a little bit of the chills because I know the white will make me instantly awake and a real person on some mission, about to make some subtle contribution to humanity. But it's not really the white that gets me. It's all the splendid clutter on the page. Just above the Publish Post button are directions for how to make blog writing simpler by taking the following steps:

Shortcuts: press Ctrl with: B = Bold, I = Italic, P = Publish, S = Save, D = Draft.

Right above that is this gray box of words,

Labels for this post: e.g. scooters, vacation, fall.

Atop the blog box are a variety of buttons for installing videos, hyperlinks, images, text color. It feels like there's a lot going on here already before I've even logged in and now I'm just here to join the party.

The kicker, though, is that when I'm almost done writing a blog, I click the Publish Post button just to see what the words look like, and do you know what it looks like? An accomplishment. When you save a document in Word it doesn't go anywhere. It stays the same, white and blue. But my blog becomes something new and meaningful each time I publish. It's startling, really, to see my words go from the stark white to the neutral taupe/brown blog format of my own creation. That new page each time is like a big pillow telling me, hey, these are your words, they were waiting for you here all along, and you know what? They're so great I've etched them onto me. Now come rest your head. You are done today.

I guess writing within a blog is pretty fun. I cannot eat an apple while doing it. I'd get too nervous. When I'm writing I can't add anything to myself. All I can do is pull myself apart.

FYI: I've lost a total of eight eyelashes to this blog. It's a small loss. I'm using the fallen victims as dashes to demarcate my different ideas for the next blog entitled "The Erudition of Texts" (which unlike this blog, actually has a subject I've thought about, and might even include a thread of coherence). Now I've moved the eyelashes over to enclose the tentative title I've written as stand-ins for quotation marks. Those black flakes once a part of me now stand out vividly on the yellow legal pad. On the page I am dead. Or is it, I am dead on the page?

Ah, no matter. Eyelashes as punctuation--how can I go wrong?

Okay, time now to pee.