The Beginnings of the Ends of Things

The Beginnings of the Ends of Things

I don't know how I got so rusty, but the habit of writing things I think in anything but the briefest of bursts has fallen away from me with disturbing completeness. And here I am, ineptly marshalling all those unexcised words -- the things I'm always thinking, the conversations I'm always having, like a practice game of chess where you play both sides of the board and can only ever win and lose at the same time.

It's September. It used to be November for me. November was the month of melancholy. All my memories of loss and disappointment seemed to crowd around the eleventh month on calendar pages of the past. But today, it's September. And today, I'm realizing that if you live long enough, and ill-advisedly allow yourself to get your hopes up enough, you'll be disappointed plenty in all of the various months, and disaffectedness will not be necessarily seasonal. It's a law of averages thing.

It's September. But the melancholy mood lacks the clear causality of melancholy moods past. It isn't just one thing anymore. In a way, I covet those days when things were so seemingly clear and dire. Maybe clarity is a luxury of the naïve. Things are not clear. They are infinitely cloudy. Infinitely complex. The solutions are infinite. And possibly unknowable.

When we write, we either want to be saying something very timely or something timeless. When we publish our thoughts, we want to be the first to have the idea in a moment of great meaning, or we want to coin the idioms that will pepper the English of others long into the future. Well, some of us want these things. There are also plenty of people publishing today who are content to string a few words together. There are people today who are content to seek the attention of strangers just to say they're going to bed now. I hope it's fair to say that we are in danger of evolving past artistry altogether. But then, the value of a moment or a thought or a poignant turn of phrase is not uniform. And the only hope of not flailing to death in frustration is to try and regularly talk to at least one or two other people who see the same value that you do, however high or low it is. A shared sense of what is and isn't good, what is and isn't important. It's the only thing that matters.

There are a slew of draft posts pending in my blog account. They date back years. But the new thing that makes them update to today's date each time you open them makes me fear I'll destroy my own history just by trying to consider it. Sometimes I need to know when I felt that way as much as I need to know what I felt. It's a context thing. And another argument in favor of just writing shit down in a notebook like I used to.