Writing In Permanence

Today I was looking for something (I can’t remember what because I got sidetracked) and I found a big pile of spiral bound notebooks from years past. These notebooks are filled with thoughts, hopes, dreams, song lyrics, notes from various classes, doodles and other such things one might find in a notebook owned by someone who dreams more than he accomplishes.

There is something very magical in going back through things like that. I don’t think many have the same archive of things I do, as my notebooks go back all the way to about almost 1981 or 1982. I have always made a point to not throw away anything I ever write if I can help it. That notebook from 1982 I have is the one where I wrote my first play, a story about my G.I. Joe action figures attacking a secret base for Cobra.

It’s a horrible play, but I was 10 when I wrote it so fuck off. And I spelled almost everything correctly, in ink, and in ACTUAL cursive. The kind of cursive you have to practice in school and get grades on. Part of me wants to scan those pages into the computer and post it for the world to see, but, like almost everything else in my life, I didn’t finish the play because I got tired of writing it and nobody wants to read 14 pages of story setup with no denouement unless you are deeply into Akira Kurosawa films and really obscure references like the one I just used.

Looks like I’ve been doing the same thing for almost 30 years, huh? Starting things and never finishing them. I am 155 pages into a screenplay I have no ending for. I am 65 pages into a different screenplay I don’t like anymore. I am 135 hours into 4 college degrees that I have no money to finish and no job prospects to think of even if I did finish one or all of them.

There are some interesting things in the notebooks, though, finished or not. At one point I was going to buy one every January and keep those notebooks like volumes of my life. But the notebooks started combining years because I never filled all of one in a year, until my latest notebook has covered almost 3 years and still has almost all of it left. I haven’t written a song lyric in a couple of years, probably closer to three years, because I don’t see the point of any of that stuff if I’m never going to finish it. My dreams of being a rapper are long gone anyway. And not even cats in heat want to hear me sing, so why continue writing?

I think the advent of the computer might have led to the downfall of my writing permanence. I still have saved all of the blogs I have ever written in my Word program on my computer, but this computer is getting close to running its course and I am not savvy enough to figure out how to transfer all of the volumes of things I have written onto another computer. I’m sure it is simple and I could figure it out in a few minutes of whacking the keyboard, but there is a whole lot less charm in looking at stuff I have written on a white screen versus looking at journal entries I have written with my own hand.

The part of me that wants to live forever always kind of hoped that when I died someone would find all of these journal entries and want to publish them. But, honestly, who the hell would read the journal entries of someone who halfway finished almost everything in his life? In fact, the only thing I am SURE I will finish in my life is my actual life. And that’s only because I have no choice. I spent almost 25 minutes writing my screenplay today, which is 25 minutes more than I have spent in the last 10 days, but after 25 minutes all I wanted to do was get online to see if anyone had written me an e-mail.

Who knows what brilliance I have lost to the world by sending it over e-mail to friends and family members? Who knows what ignorant crap I have sent over that same electronic Pony Express? Whatever I have written in e-mail form has been lost to the world over the last few years because, unlike my handwritten notebooks, I don’t save ANY e-mails because they are impersonal and they all look the same, no matter how brilliant or stupid the writing in them may be.

There is something special to be said about the way my handwriting looks when I’m drunk. Or the way it looks when I’m pissed off at the world. Or the way it looks after I’ve killed myself in the gym. Or when I’m in love. All of those nuances are lost when I put the keys to motion and throw my thoughts down on a screen. All of that humanity is gone. And yet I don’t want to handwrite things like this because it would definitely take too long to get from my mind to my page. If I type 60 words a minute I can get probably 40 more words per minute to the “page” than I ever could by writing it by hand.

So I lose the ability to genuinely think about what I am writing. I just flow words from my mind to the computer screen and I let that highly impersonal style affect the way I connect with the rest of the world. Should I be sad about that? Should all of us be sad about that?

I think I am.

B!