AUTHOR’S NOTE: Way the hell back when I started this column – on September 24th of 2023 – I had but one commandment to follow. Thou shalt not phone it in. In other words: if I didn’t have something to say worth saying, I would err on the side of discretion and maybe just shut the fuck up for a minute, till a worthy muse returned.
This last week has been crazy hard, in that respect. Because I had TONS to talk about – that wasn’t the issue – but my poor l’il’ brain was soooooo exhausted from the rigors of shooting a feature in six-anna-half days that I couldn’t whip up a decent sentence to save my life.
In retrospect, I realize it’s too soon to talk at any length about the astounding experience I just had. There's still a lot of processing to be done, from the distance that only comes with time.
So instead of attempting to whip up a narrative storm, when I currently lack the mental windpower to tickle notes from a kazoo, I’m gonna go back to the original mission of dredging the Facebook memory archives.
And this one, from waaaaaay the hell back in 2016, seems particularly apropos at the moment. I hope that you enjoy!
I write out of joy and pain. But mostly joy.
The pain is why I write. The joy is the writing itself. My fingers on the keys make music, in exactly the same way that my fingers on guitar strings, or bongo skins, or a piano's ivories turn simple hand gestures into soaring epiphanies of sound that awaken and calm all the sweet, savage beasts of my nature.
Words can be music, too. They can sing. THEY WANT TO SING. Every word you ever learned was begging you to let it sing. Let it ring out. Let it carry all its cargo, all the emotion and information invested in it. Let it say what it came here to say. Let it cry to the heavens, and dance with the stars.
Words don't want to be carelessly clattered, like a handful of chump change you slam on the counter as tip for the surly waitress at some diner that sucked. They make great boxing gloves, but thud like mud in the hands of the careless and indifferent. Words are not turds to be thoughtlessly dumped. They are diamonds to be treasured. Little miracles of potential communication, without whom we would all be screwed.
If we're already screwed, it might have something to do with treating diamonds like mud. Devaluing our magick, by not knowing what we've got.
So I love to write. I do it every single day. I do it because it makes me happy. Makes me feel connected to the essence of life, and the heart of communication. Keeps me open to adventure and experience. Gives me a way to express the adventure of this experience called life. And maybe even help put it in perspective.
That's what I call joy.
As for the pain? Well, it is what it is.
I want to take your comments about the joy of words and assign it to every high school student's English class. I want them to take your spot on value of language and words and apply it!!