Get Stuck-In

I mentioned a few weeks ago that the chiseling device I use to scratch these scritchings onto the wall of the internet every Thursday is in a bit of a dog-with-debilitating-but-not-yet-paralyzing-hip-dysplasia sort of a phase, where it still functions, but it's sad because you can tell it doesn't really get up on the couch like it used to. It's become so unreliable it let me mix two completely dumb metaphors already--in the very first sentence--while making absolutely zero effort to stop me. My laptop is a chisel but it's also a dog? Come on, MacBook Pro. At least try.

In that piece I noted that I've had a CD-R stuck in there for a very long time; a time long-ago enough that people still used CD-Rs to store things. The drive eject motor thingy broke a good while back, so it's irretrievable without either breaking the thing open or paying money for a professional to slightly more carefully break the thing open. Worse, up until very recently, I was under the impression that the drive itself was non-functional. IMAGINE MY SURPRISE then when, as I opened up this old clunky thing again and proceeded immediately to find literally any way possible to procrastinate vs. the self-imposed obligation to actually write something, I clicked on the CD-R icon on the laptop and... it actually worked?

I saw documents I could immediately open in glorious MSWord for Mac 2011. I saw file folders holding other documents I could also immediately open in glorious MSWord for Mac 2011. Notes, short stories, poems, outlines, sketches, fragments... all there for perusing.

And in case we accidentally underestimate the archaeological significance of this discovery, keep in mind that I have meticulously migrated my writing files from computer to computer throughout my computer-owning life, so even though I got this particular one in 2011, the files themselves date back to the time when I had to go down into the basement of the engineering department at the University of California Riverside in 1997 and request a school email address, like a weirdo. I'm not kidding, at the time, you couldn't just get one, you had to have a written reason to get one, and even then, if you weren't some kind of science person, which I MOST DEFINITELY have was not and have never been mistaken for, they were still suspicious as shit. A .edu email address back then was for organizing FTP file transfers, sexually harassing the support staff or exchanging moves in play-by-email years-long Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. And that was all. If I'd known, I would have just gotten an AOL address like a normie. But those cost money. And I was already paying for tuition. So they coughed it up.

The email address didn't facilitate the writing directly, but it let me share things in the ways in which I wanted to share them, which is to say: with almost no one. But I did fancy myself a writer of sorts and I didn't yet know the hard truth that I am pretty crap at fiction, so it was a tool to submit things to fantasy publications from zines to literary anthologies with national circulations. Oh, because I was a fantasy dork at the time. I still am, to be clear, I just no longer try to write it. At some point around 2004 I realized I was more suited to essay-style missives in a meta-voice where I write about things, like for instance: writing, how I write things, the things I write things on, etc.

I poked through some of the old work (much of it 10-20 years old by now) and I have to say... a lot of it is pretty terrible. I was mad at all those zines who didn't want it at the time--incredulous, really!--but with the eye of experience and the years now to develop a more objective certainty of my own inadequacy, yeah, I get it. I would reject me too. The world didn't want my short story about two people engaged in a silent contest to the death where they take turns eating different flowers, each with a different magical effect the contestant wouldn't know until after he or she ate it. I literally cannot believe nobody wanted that. It had a disadvantage in that I never actually wrote an ending for it nor did I ever formally submit it anywhere,* but still. ALL THIS WASTED GENIUS!

I'll read through some of it just for the cringe, but I have to say: if you trudged through the pandemic kicking yourself for not taking the free time to produce some kind of earth-shattering art, I'm here from the future to tell you: the rest of your life is not an opportunity missed. If you're not a famous chef or a published writer or a gallery-packing artist, take comfort in knowing, like I do now, that the thing you want to present to the world is probably just mediocre. And that's OK! A hobby is valuable. Expression is valuable. Self-betterment and stress relief are both goals that seem small, but if more people were taking the time to do those things, think of the impact that would have at the world at large.

And this, in conclusion, is why this blog post is the most important thing you will read today. Thank you for coming to my pep talk.

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*No-ending short stories were a thing in the very early 2000s, I could have still sent it in, you don't know.