I can make fun of this goofball

I have been blogging online for two decades, which one can agree is too long to do many things except breathe. I am not going to stop because I don't know what will happen. It comes automatically, both the writing and the breathing.

I write about myself in part because it is a safer way. When I, at twenty, decided that I was somehow entitled to chronicling the ongoing events of my loved ones' lives, they reacted with an understandable affront to the presumption. Writing publicly to exercise my skills has resulted in the people in my life rightly taking me to task. I rarely have this problem anymore. People have better things to do than read a blog. All the same, I am not keen to bother loved ones with my written interpretations.

David Sedaris taught me well that you are the only person in your life who you can safely make fun of since you aren't going to fight back. As a side effect, it helps me better know myself and has only slightly contributed to personality quirks that need professional remediation.

Most importantly, I am the one to whom my story is apt to be most interesting. Anyone else gets to swallow a few well-polished anecdotes, honed to smoothness, innocuous to the digestive tract.

It is imperfect. Amber stated that I do not 100% get her quotes right, but she is no longer motivated to read much I do not intentionally put in front of her. She read of her own volition the series of entries about our kitten dying of lymphoma, which I suggested she not read. My therapy shouldn't be her torture. She later accused that I made facts up to suit the melodrama, how I claimed that the lethal Blue Juice was already out when we entered the room. She implied how ghastly that would be, and why would I disparage her hospital's protocols for my literary flourish? When I told her I was sure fluid was on the counter, she realized I had seen their disinfectant, also starkly blue. My observations were correct. Only my conclusions were erroneous. In short, I didn't embellish, just misinterpreted, so she could forgive the error this time.

I am an inveterate storyteller. Whenever I meet new people, I start proffering them one or another of my stock anecdotes. My audience tends to be startled, which is almost embarrassing because these recollections are not as significant in my head. "Oh, of course, I went to a pig roast at a voodoo priestess's house and had to make certain the living pig I was stroking was a petting pig and not an eating pig. Who hasn't been there, am I right?" (She did feed a part of the cooked pig to the pet pig, which is how you get prions.) I have stood in front of large crowds present to listen to one of my panels, but I don't act as though they are paying attention to me. I don't assume the spotlight is on me, even when a spotlight is literally on me, and so I am not anxious about interacting. I've been a teenager. It's exhausting assuming everyone cares about you. I prefer the assumption of indifference as I have it here.

Amber is mostly resigned that I will keep telling her story. When she first met me, she endeavored to read this journal from the beginning to get a better feel for me but gave up because I was a pretentious kid when I started it and had yet to unlearn both written and psychological bad habits. Teen Me was not Now Me, so it didn't matter to her. She was sure that I would tell her the highlights.

When I write, it is usually because I must get something out of me before it drives me to anxiety. I don't always fully know what I am thinking until I've written it down.

My writing here is not always up to my standards -- sometimes, as in this entry, I have only a thin gruel to review -- but perfectionism isn't the point. This is only one page of a more extensive work, one from which I gladly steal when I need a story for a new anthology or foundation for one of my characters. Writing is the practice that will get me toward the product I need and deserve to create.

I don't fight the writing, usually creating here what feels more natural and pressing, which is why I do not always detail the goings-on in my life and have contemplated my belly-button to distraction more than enough. When I try to force the writing here to my whims, it backs out of my reach, and I stomp my foot in frustration. I trust that it is forming as I need it. I don't need to make a pate from my writing, shoving adverbs down its throat until its liver is purple prose.

I don't know that I had much of a goal when I started writing here beyond that I enjoy writing, and adults told me that this was something at which I excelled. I then might have been marginally better at writing than the next person, but I was not yet a good writer. I merely liked writing and would do it without anyone pressing me. If I had a goal, I do not think I would have persisted. I certainly would have felt the hit to my motivation when I realized few if any people were going to read most of the things I have written here, and no one was ever going to read everything. That would be a sort of unflattering obsession.

I write toward or around ideas with my novels and short stories, but that doesn't come into journaling. Life isn't clear enough to have leitmotifs. I do not have a clear ending to the narrative of my life, except death. I will likely not be around to write the entry when I die, though I may write most of it in advance.

I am open to discovering where this will go. At times, writing here provided the cloak of fictionality when I was not happy where my life had placed me and was too scared of the sea change that would be necessary to change.

This was a lot like learning to walk. All I did was flail for a while, but that eventually got my legs under me, making the proper motions. Then I walked. Now I can dance, or sprint, or gambol, or climb. If I started out thinking I would write the Great American Novel -- and I won't -- I would never have given myself the liberty to be terrible at writing, so I would not have improved. I doubt I am writing for the sort of people who linger in college creative writing classes. If I had told myself of my objective, I could not have reached it. (I do not have a goal now, or not a firm one. I want people to read more of my books and, ideally, review them somewhere or talk to people about them to have more readers. I don't believe there is a clear through-line between journaling and people buying fiction.)

Since I've started writing for the sake of writing again, even though I have seen little to no difference in my readership and certainly not in my book sales, I have created so much more. (I credit this slightly to enough medication and sleep, but those are boring reasons, and I would rather it be something I am consciously doing in my practice.)

I have made excuses in the past for not creating, mainly because no one was paying me to do it and very few people read or cared. But that is all these were: excuses. You create for the sake of creation because something within you needs to midwife this art, or you will never be unburdened. When I could have written and did not, I felt resentful. Every time I post one of these entries or a story on ThommQuackenbush.com, I am lighter. I liberate some of the calculus of living, and I can move with more ease.

last watched: What If...?
reading: Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies