The thing about being a writer is that there is an avenue for the incessant inner dialogue to take when it needs an off-ramp. I’m not being so bold as to assert that I’m a writer, merely that I know how to write shit down when I can’t stand it anymore.
Another thing about being “one who writes” is that no matter how dreadfully boring her life may be, she can always embellish. Because even while she sits in a cubicle at work, she is flying somewhere, or twisting someone’s words and gestures around to be far more amusing than they really are. People are basically characters in her story. Every office has characters, and some are stranger than fiction, to be sure. But mostly they’re just people with their individual idiosyncrasies. The person who writes makes them bigger idiosyncrasies.
I suppose visual artists operate in much the same way only they see things differently, rather than dealing with dialogue that has to be written down in order to get a moment‘s rest. They see a cubicle and create a sculpture or a painting to express what the cubicle represents to them. Whereas the writer sits in the cubicle and thinks of millions of things that may have absolutely nothing to do with the cubicle. Certainly the creative mind is not exclusive. Verbal people can be visual, and visual people can be verbal. It’s all about expression.
Geez. I hadn’t meant to get so fucking philosophical. It was an off-ramp moment.
So the fact that I tend to drink too much sometimes puts me in an awkward position when there are things like computers and phones around. My inner rants and imaginings, while better served on paper or in my private documents, tend to end up in social media. Sometimes the effect is good. Sometimes… not so much. Sometimes is the operative word in this paragraph. It’s a good word. Noncommittal. I will place it on my list of favorite words with careen, damask, and diaphanous. My friend Vivian’s favorite word is preternatural.
You see all the shit in my head? I wish I could type as fast as I think. I could write the equivalent of War and Peace every day by lunch time.
I wish Tennessee Williams, Andy Warhol, and Lenny Bruce were still alive and using Facebook. Can you imagine? It would be awesome to read their drunken, public, rants. I would absolutely ask them to be my friends so I could be a voyeur and read about the party Tennessee Williams went to the night before and who he pissed off... or went home with. I could read a bitchy conversation between Edie Sedgwick and one of her friends. Imagine if Edie had written this on Facebook!!
“I'm a little nervous about saying anything about the artist, because it kind of sticks him right between the eyes, but he deserves it. He really fucked up a great many young people's lives.”
This would have inspired a heated response from Warhol that we could enjoy in real time.
Lenny Bruce would probably get censored right off of FB. At the very least all of his friends and friends of friends would block him. But I wouldn’t. I love a renegade.
I really try to keep my FB comments brief. Really I do. I try to remember the Hippocratic Oath, “Do No Harm.” You don’t have to be a doctor to benefit from that one.
I’m not entirely sure what my point is trying to be here. Off-ramps, writing, Facebook, cubicles, who knows? It’s that kind of a day and it was time to write stuff down.
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