Boxes

I've been writing so long, it makes me feel old.

. I have boxes and folders and notebooks and journals and piles of loose-leaf paper filled with poems, diary entries, barely-begun novels, ideas, theories, research....nothings. I began in middle school when my English teacher, Mrs. Garza, had the class write twenty poems and make them into a slam book of sorts.

At the time of each piece, I was feeling what I wrote. To me, it was the most profound write ever penned. But as I thumb through so many pages I get paper cuts but no boom. Heartbreakingly few of them seem worthy of sharing, and not a one reads immortal. It's a very humbling, discouraging reality, going through thousands upon thousands of poems and not only finding fault with all of them, but also seeing them for what they are: bitter bile spewed volatile in the moment, now only a sour stench on parchment.

I wanted to rip them all to shreds, burn each tiny piece and scatter the ashes in the wind, but a narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive part of me knows it is absolutely necessary to retain all documentation of every emotional fallout, every literary failure, every time I feel my life is worth chronicling.

Even if/when it's not.

Gnawing Ache of Desire

Hypergraphia.
Graphomania.
Scribomania.

All those are taken, so I thought I'd be clever and do psychoscribbles, you know, like psycho-babble? But no, some person who was clever before I came along already took that.

I also considered ScribbleScratchScrawl, but...I thought about how I'd feel regarding the author of that particular blog for making me type all that in the url window. Somewhere along the lines of disdain.

I'd like to tell you that I'm currently sitting at my own desk, an expansive oak with lots of drawers (full of neatly stacked packages of college-rule paper, blank notebooks, self-made chapbooks, and other writerly treasures), covered in all my old journals, cups of pens (particularly the ones that flow smoothest on paper), pencils, markers, highlighters, and sharpies, a cup of coffee in my hand when I pause from writing this, and a beautiful, majestic view of a gray-brown, weathered dock leading out into koolaid blue water, which I will walk at sundown and just....inhale the inspiration of life and listen to the muses whisper in the wind.

I am sorry to disappoint you, fair subjects, but I am typing this on my 15-minute break at my desk with a financial institution. I have, however, ingested copious amounts of coffee this drizzly morning.

As I'm writing this, I am inwardly complaining to myself and the universe and my God and your God and your gods and your goddesses and the trees and the phone on my desk about not being able to write. They say to write without ceasing. Like a religion. "Pray without ceasing." Phillipians, something. I think. I probably have that wrong. But you get the gist, si?

Write like praying.

I try. Most days I try. A poem. A journal entry. I feel bulemic. Forcing puke out in lacy letters. Bitter is a truth. I can feel it undergoing alchemic transformations which will soon be anger, hatred. I fear this sludge work which I've done for so long it's probably a part of my DNA now. God forbid my children have inherited the customer service gene. I've done this for so long I've been brainwashed to believe I love it, it is a privilege. It is all-consuming, this massive part of my day that overshadows all else - my children, my family, my writing, my dreams.

When I leave, I usually don't feel like utilizing my brain for any sort of function, so I either watch cartoons with my children or some mind-numbing television show or play Cookie Jam.

Have you seen (or read) The Phantom Tollbooth? With the boy and the dog and they enter another world through a play tollbooth gifted to him. At one point, the boy passes through a part of the world with the dolldrums - they cease to do anything, just sit down and nearly wink out of existence.

That is what the aptly named web does that - it sucks you in, quickly, traps you in its sticky strings of trolls, games, apps, memes and cat videos. I am guilty. Perhaps doomed to watch life go by in clips on YouTube, and if you find that funny instead of tragic, if you laugh instead of choke up and realize we're all the same, then we've gone so far beyond failing we may as well be in that other world, laying down with the dolldrums, and forget existence.

And the evening and morning and the post were the first day.