Pete's Log: existential overdose
Entry #1169, (Books, Writing, n such)(posted when I was 23 years old.)
An opium den is my new home. I am surrounded by the remains of burnt incense. Fragrance that I all too quickly become accustomed to. The smoke looks cool, but the scent of it escapes me. I leave the room for a moment. Return. Ahh, there it is. But now it's gone again.
You should, I tell myself, write something. A story. Yes. It's 4:20 (OK, 4:19, but 4:20 is more fun) in the morning, and you're not asleep. Nice work, mister. So do something with yourself. Write. (It's now 4:20 for real.) Write!
Character development. An idea that once occurred to me as a great means for character development would be to begin a journal for a fictitious person. I enjoy writing in my little web log, and I don't even do anything terribly exciting. Imagine what fun stuff you could write if you just made shit up. Today, on my way home from work, I was attacked by mutant zombies. Normally I'd have simply knocked them out and returned them to the zoo, but this time I knew they were on their way to corrupt young children with talk of individual responsibility. Such evil I could not allow. So I killed them all with my trusty spoon.
Alas, my life is less exciting than that. While certainly enough happens to keep me entertained, I've yet to reach a point in my life where thinking about whom I'd most like cast as myself in the movie they're gonna make about me is a reasonable use of my time. Instead, I try to get lost.
The problem is, I'm no good at it. Or maybe I'm just too scared to do it properly. I am hindered, in most of my attempts, by a few things. First, I know where I started from. Second, I'm pretty decent at keeping track of which direction I'm facing. Simply given those factors makes getting lost difficult. And beyond that, I've got maps of South Bend and Indiana in my car, though I've never had to use them during any of my driving adventures. And finally, I'm lucky, patient, and I enjoy not knowing where I am.
Some 97 years ago, apparently, I created a file on my laptop called blah. Accounting for the fact that my hardware clock is slightly out of synch, this file is one I created sometime last week. Most of its contents is silly and not worthy of concern, but the first two paragraphs are somewhat nice, so I'll share them here:
"Incandescent happiness. I picture this as a sort of state in which the happiness internal to me is so bright, so energetic, that it radiates energy. The happiness becomes clearly visible to others, a bright source of light in a vague world of shadows. Energy to be harvested and reused.
I didn't feel like writing anything structured just now. I wanted freedom from the responsibilities associated with fancy text editing capabilities. In order to gain some of this freedom, I'm writing using "cat > blah". While I am still subject to the ability to hit backspace to fix typos, I am free at least in that I can edit no lines other than the current. I can't go back. I must go on. Freedom from structure. Freedom from random access. I wish I could enjoy it more."
I think beyond all else, the reason I most like writing in my journal is that I enjoy reading my own writing. Not all of it, but enough of it. When bored I can easily amuse myself by playing with the random log entry feature of my log. So I write more, so that I may read more. A vicious cycle, except it's not vicious.
It should be noted, I think, that the file blah that I quote above is four paragraphs in length, and I chose only to quote two of those four. The other paragraphs are not poorly written or embarrassing, they are simply boring. They don't seem like they'd be worth my while to read years from now.
I just realized that Pete's Log celebrates its third birthday in less than a week. Three years of journaling. That's quite a few. And yet not nearly enough. I greatly wish I had started earlier. I look forward to decades from now (if God, the universe, James T. Kirk or whatever it is that controls such things allows it) being able to read the wealth of material I've collected in my log database. After three years, I seem to have about 1.6 megs of log data stored. Note to self: I've not backed that up in a while.
As I sat down to write, I was trying to convince myself I should write a story of some sorts. But brainstorming led to stream of consciousness, led not to a story. Fiction has occurred to very little degree tonight.
Last Sunday I found myself writing as well. I wrote an email to myself. Upon reading it the next day, I discovered that it lacked any real substance, but it is sort of pretty. So I'll quote it:
"strange circumstance, and I am still awake. My wisdom, my knowledge, my ability to speak coherently is demanded of me in mere hours. A countable number of breaths stand between me and the lecture, I suppose, given somebody willing to count them. An automated means of counting could be used, I'm sure, but that would take away from the sense of time that a manual counting by a fellow human soul, capable of boredom and the errors of impatience, would offer. I'm better off, I think, with only the impression that my breaths could be counted, and not, after all, with an actual number. I should sleep, I think. I also felt an urgent need for a paragraph break just then, but this is a story that desires the monotony possible only when empty lines are not. I am not asleep because my mind is racing, bringing to the foreground stories once told and stories perhaps imagined. The seventeenth floor stands prominently in my conscious thoughts, overwhelming me with the realization that everything is yet again as it always has been. I stand back to survey my situation and discover, with no great surprise, that if I try to grasp my current state of mind, I find only whispers of past feelings slip between my fingers. A fog, perhaps, of thought that obscures the wisdom of immortality, veils whatever absolute truths may reside in our universe. I don't think they're there anyway. A chance to peek behind the veil may offer little more than the realization that the veil was never there in the first place. A tour through ominous caverns, the tour guide reminding us that flash photography is prohibited. A stalactite, product of centuries of dull growth, may find salvation in the sudden catastrophe a bright explosion could offer, but we must preserve the slow change of nature, so that it will look exactly the same when our offspring decide to chance a trip. The fog lifts eventually. As mysterious as the landscape was, it's better off without vapor hugging it, unsure of how to act, but clinging as long as it has a chance. Smoke is by far superior. The smoke brought on by the smallest of reactions can exploit its new freedom to react in surprising ways to its environment. An intent student of smoke could learn a thing or two from observing it, if only the commercial break on TV were not about to end."
Silly me. I wish I had the patience, the experience, the motivation, the discipline to write something real. I just realized that I used the word real in an unusual manner, because when I say I want to write something real, what I want to write is fiction. Real writing, or at least the sort I consider real, is writing about stuff that is not real.
Reality is an absurd concept anyway, or so I've always said. Or at least I'd like to pretend right now that I've said that on occasions prior to the current.
I do have a couple stories floating around in my head and to some extent on a few pieces of paper I've lost track of. The more recent is one in which I've lost interest. It was born out of frustrated emotion, and while playing with it I had a good place to vent that emotion. But that emotion is gone now, I've moved past it, and thus the motivation for that story is gone. I'm almost sad about that, because some elements of the story were somewhat interesting. Perhaps someday I'll find reason to revisit and record it.
The other story, the one that's been captive within my mind for several years now, is a silly science fiction epic. I have only vague ideas of the overall plot, but certain scenes exist very vividly in my imagination, and the prime deterrent keeping them off paper is my desire to research good scientific background for what I picture happening. I am, after all, an engineer, and I desire to offer explanation for the future wonders I envision. It is only a matter of time, I suspect, before this story can no longer be contained.
But tonight, at least, I think it is still safely contained inside my skull. The world is safe, but for how long?
Sleep beckons.