Public Mind Defecation

Ergh'em...cough...*grunt*...Okay...I force myself...I mean...I write during the first fifteen minutes of seminar period on M,T,R,F every week just as I require my students to do. Often the case is that just random drivel comes out and nothing more ever comes of it, but I sorely need to keep writing in an effort to knock some of the rust from the more poetic parts of my brain.

I've been very good at writing whenever the students write even though sometimes there seems to be so many other more pressing duties to attend to. Too often I just end up writing about my events of the day or writing my todo list for the rest of the week and it really amounts to no more than mindless keyboard rattling.

No insights come. I don't find myself drawing grand parallels between my continuing wars against my personal demons and thus enlightening myself. I haven't yet discovered the plot line behind my first mediocre novel. I would say "my first great novel," but I'm a humble bugger and thus I will settle for "mediocre."

Most days I don't sense any cleansed karma from confessing my sins via the point of a pen or the pixels of a computer screen. I rarely feel like I am any closer to identifying who I really am nor feel any closer to the center of the universe.

But for some reason, I feel less when I not writing regularly. Less how? I don't know exactly, but definitely less. I'm not sure if I have a strong desire to write because I have some sort of inflated idea of my writing gift and would feel bad if I didn't use it or if I have something more like a masochistic authoring OCD.

I haven't yet achieved the level of authorial honesty I truly would like. I think I may not have yet worked up my courage enough for that yet. After all, I do believe that my mom and my sister do still read some of this stuff and some of the poison pen honesty I look up to in other writers may simply cost me more of a price in my dignity and than I am willing to pay.

I think that is why I keep waiting for some sort of fiction plot to pop into my head that just calls on me to write it out. Fiction is safer. I could blame everything on my characters. ("What? No, I have never masturbated in a stall in the college library. But this character I am writing about has.") But when it comes to fiction, once I work through a plot in my head for a few days, I am already bored by it. I simply have much more fun trying to be cynically funny about the real ridiculousness of the human condition than anything else.

So here I sit....again. Trying to kickstart my writing module....again, and hoping that forcing myself to put things out in the public eye will force me to write about something, anything, other than my weekly to do list.