I haven’t written anything serious for a while. Part of that has to do with the general busyness of life. Mostly it is due to my own laziness and weirdness. Every so often I go through cycles of thinking, “Who the hell  wants to read what I have to say? There are so many terrific bloggers out there who write about this stuff  much better than I can, what’s the point of me putting my crap up?” When you add in my ADD-influenced propensity to begin things and not finish them (or to not even start because it will never be as good as it appears in my head), that all leads to periods of less writing, aka blogging.

I’m not really a writer. I can write, but it’s not really who I am the way it is for some people. Sure, I won NaNoWriMo back in 2005 (don’t ask, you can’t read it; it was all done with pencil in Moleskine notebooks. Think about that: 50,000 words. In pencil. My hand is still recovering). That got the creative juices flowing, and for a brief time I thought that I could, perhaps, actually write. See, my whole life, that I can remember, I have been composing in my head what I call my “essays”. My mind never really shuts off and so it starts to ponder life, the universe and everything. It begins composing these essays as a way of organizing my thoughts into a more structured form. Unfortunately, I have a limited amount of mental RAM, so by the time I’ve gotten a little way into it, I’ve completely forgotten how it started. If I try to go back and recreate the beginning, I’ll then loose where I was going. They start to veer off into tangents and end up who knows where.

“So write it down!”, you’re going to say. I know you are going to say this because I say it to myself. This is a problem for two reasons. One is that these essays usually begin composing themselves at times where writing is impossible: driving, working in the yard, at really boring parties, during corporate meetings, etc. The second is that my mind is too fast for my fingers. It wants to follow its own thoughts while I’m still trying to craft that last sentence. In my head, sentence structure and phrasing take a back seat to the act of thinking itself. I can shortcut a sentence by inserting what I mean, rather than what I explicitly say. Once it’s down on paper (or screen) I am forced to compulsively edit and craft what I am trying to say, to try to make it comprehensible.

As a general rule, I am much better at writing by hand than I am typing. Even though I print, I am still faster than I am at typing (though I am a pretty good typist. 10+ years of computer programming has made it second nature). But more than that, I sometimes seem to have a kind of dysgraphia where I am completely unable to compose a sentence in front of the keyboard. I can write pages and pages of stream of consciousness type crap on paper, but put me in front of a computer with no specific topic and my mind locks up.

Another factor that contributes to my lack of writing is my anal retentiveness. I try to avoid debates and arguments because I loathe making statements based just on how I feel rather than on facts that I can document and recite. Even if I know that I have made a decision on a topic based on hard facts that I have researched, if I can’t repeat them at a later time, I’m reluctant to speak on that topic. I do that a lot. I’ll research something, find out all I can about it, make a decision, then promptly loose all the details, leaving me with a conclusion but not able to say specifically why I came to it. If it’s not something that I’m currently dealing with over a period of time as the primary focus of my attention, it’s leaves. Not completely, but enough of the detail has vanished that it sounds like I don’t know what I’m talking about if I try to explain. This is very frustrating for a person who likes to have things backed up with facts and who wants to know the how and why of things. Especially when trying to write from a skeptical point of view.

So we end up here. Not really any place much different from where we started, eh? Still, it’s loosened some of the bolts, sprayed WD-40 on the rusty writing joints, so to speak. Bottom line is that I’m going to try to make an effort to produce more original content rather than just forwarding funny pictures or making snarky comments about right-wing fundagelical asshats (although that is really fun. I don’t think I could stop doing that even if I wanted to. Which I don’t. Snark is hardwired into my brain).

Thanks for humoring me. And thanks for reading.