surprise

Sometimes I surprise myself. Sometimes I start writing one thing, and a phrase or a sentence, seemingly out of place, will push what I'm writing in a different direction. It's one of those times when you have no idea what you really think until you write it down. You find yourself reading it as your fingers type it out, thinking is this really how I feel? And apparently, it is. Or maybe you don't, but the sentence has its own direction and logic, or it's too well-formed, and you can't withdraw it. Sometimes a phrase will have an unexpected felicity. Not my aunt Felicity. The noun felicity. You're not expecting anything worthwhile, rhythmic, graceful or thoughtful to appear, but suddenly it's there and you're typing away, moving the cursor past the unexpectedly beautiful words. Another line. You bracket the beautiful moment with more words and hope that someone takes note and gets a spark of enjoyment.

Other times, of course, I do not surprise myself at all, and I write tortuous, overthought, overprocessed shit. It's like the frozen yoghurt I had today, which had two kinds of tasty fruit, one block of tasty frozen yoghurt, but came out as a brown paste. It looked like fancy dogshit. If you mated a dog and a pastry squeezer, it would crap out this stuff. Which, if you're following along, resembles the bad stuff I write. Today I wrote several paragraphs on sudoku, and how I discovered sudoko just last night, and how it kept me up late and helped me flatter myself about my intelligence and my ability to figure out the placement of a number on a grid. I was going to post it but then I took a quick glance, just a look for the purposes of review. The mannered crapiness of it hit me like a bucket of that yoghurt I ate this evening at Superman Returns. How did that piece get past my junk filter?

Mind you, I found some poetry that I'd written after a lousy affair that I'd had in 1998 or 1999, and holy holy hell, that was bad stuff. I was an emotional wreck and I'd been reading a ton of John Ashbery at his labyrinthine best (or maybe worst), and the stuff I wrote out of that was nearly unredeemable. It wasn't even a matter of salvaging the best lines. There were just words left - a few decent words left stranded on the slopes of Mount Crapverse, waiting for the helicopters and the drooling dogs to come and rescue them. By comparison, the sudoku piece was a bit better. But not fit for my friends and neighbours on this site. So I tried to write up a Snakes on a Plane shtick, and that - ugh. Today was not a day to plan my writing. Today was a day to stay up late, stare at the screen and finally just blab a bit. Y'all have been my audience for the bit of blab. Thanks for that.

I don't generally blab on the blog (whatever you may think). Personal information, the kind that it hurts a little to part with, the kind that may actually help to share but you never know until you risk it, doesn't make it on here. Some people have praised my confessional moments, but they're wrong. You've never been privy to my confessions. This is not because I have juicy secrets - I just find it really difficult to do. Sometimes I wonder whether there's a point to it anyway; what's left to expiate or reveal? Confession is like pruning. You cut some parts away and let other parts grow. Maybe I haven't done sufficient pruning, and now I'm covered in dead and dying pieces. Wait a second. What happened to my yoghurt metaphor? And why did I write about dogs and shit in two different contexts? Good night, folks. Gooood night.