The daily activities we all undertake: eating, drinking, growing hair. Hopefully in my case, I can add to that list 1,000 words a day until I can manage to change my profession from cube monkey service lackey to professional writer. I’ve had some excellent forays in the past, and my love of our language could in fact be the only thing that’s held constant since high school (other than of course a distrust of grey dress slacks and love of those who may wear grey pleated skirts, thank you Catholic school).
I wish that I could say more about what this hopeful rekindling with the written word will ultimately be, born and burning as it currently is with the frustration of being an inquiring mind stuck in a position that is anything but. Thanks to an unfortunate economy, some serious career inertia and an immodest amount of time spent in the bars and the porches hoping to beat the sun’s rise in favor of at least some semblance of restful slumber I seem to stare out the window more than I probably should. Granted that view looks out for at least 75 miles in all directions and encompassing the new Twins Stadium, the Mississippi River some other excellent sites…but I digress.
This plans to be a place of ideas, reflections and hopefully some lively exposition concerning things more important than failblog or making bets on when the next weirdo with a samurai sword charges into a church in Texas. No disrespect to either activity, as both have been pleasant distractions for many hours I could otherwise have been doing anything more productive. Perhaps I’m trying to make up for those hours, there’s a chance I’m just preventing my mind from atrophying ahead of the mental destruction I cause on my own, I might even believe that I’m creating an antidote for the brain suck that interwebs can be. Chances are stronger though that I’m probably just using Tom Robbins’ vision of art as basically finding something that you would like to see but hasn’t been created yet, and create it. What is that beautiful thing? Let’s find that out day by day.
I hope also that aside from the words a more dedicated reader may also see something that is not heralded properly in our mental food of today – progression. They say it takes 10,000 hours to master a new skill, but along the way there would seem to be many interesting plateaus and progresses, style shifts, withheld judgements, and subtle thought and improvements in form that can hopefully serve as some reminder that it is practice makes perfect, practice develops interest, practice may create some new connections.
On a personal level, I’m looking forward to seeing the larger effect that 1,000 words a day will create in my own life outside of the scope of the ideas that make it here. Will daily writing bleed into the rest of my modes of communication, and how so? For that matter, how long will it take for the themes of the posts to form some semblence of a larger project? I definitely don’t think that I can keep this at all approaching random, despite what Newton may say – so I wonder then how far the “Just Do it” mentality can actually go.
To be fair, there should probably be rules, although I will at some point make liberal use of the elastic clause in order to get to that magic 1K a day. In fact, until the next rules committee meeting I would like to call that the only rule to be that thoughts here never become unyielding or inflexible. They say that intelligence is the ability to hold simultaneous conflicting opinions about the same topic; whether or not that’s true it’s still a good rule, and would seem to avoid many of the serious issues that we seem to be staring at in the world these days. As a former devotee to the un-rule of Calvinball, and someone who continually fights with keeping things interesting in his long term endeavours, I can’t help but think that even the rule of elasticity seems to be a bit much.
Besides, I think that the primary force of this hopefully buoyant little endeavor will be honesty. Honesty may even be the most important ideal that we can work to achieve and maintain, if for no other reason than there seems to be so little of in about. In addition to the large scale dishonesty that we’ve nearly come to expect (5,000 barrels a day? Have a feeling you’re off by at least a factor of 4…) there is also the subtler yet even more pernicious form – self deception. This latter type can pervade all our actions because we for the most part have absolutely no idea that we aren’t being transparent to ourselves. Whether it be the belief that we are still just a few seasons away from being a pro athlete or thinking that what we’ve done successfully before will work again we are all under this mild delusion. Just how successful this self-honesty is is unfortunately only discernable in retrospect – how close were we to what is actually true.
Anyone who knows me at all will quickly realize that the preceding few sentences would drive me absolutely batty were I to read them elsewhere. How does that definition of honesty work compared to colloquial use? Where do I get off calling us all delusional? How can being honest be something that is in relation to time as well, with an apparent element of truth (as in, this is objectively right)? All great questions, and all questions that I intend to suss out, but for the time being it might just be important today to give the wholly unsatisfactory “Quick, look over here!” and move on; perhaps some about fuzzy bunnies, or shiny things, or perhaps a fuzzy shiny bunny. Eh? Eh?
I admit that this is quite the ambitious project, especially for someone who normally can’t consistently do anything for longer than 45 days or so – even that would be excellent. Really, I hope that this will become a reminder of what can happen when you just DO something that you enjoy, do it consistently with no expectations and only a few hopes, and just have the belief that if it’s meant to be, it absolutely will. We’re all part of the same moment in time, this one, so let’s make it transparent, interesting, and just the right amount of irreverent. Now is too important to be taken seriously, so let’s give ourselves that break.
Until tomorrow.
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