…have to write.
Or does it.
What I mean is…
Oh damn, that sounds artificial and yet maybe not,
because who knows?
I don’t know anything about writing.
That much is clear. I didn’t know, although it seems I
did it, that there is a second personal narrative. But somehow in Iguanas, I
found myself talking to Eric on the screen—although in Iguanas it was on the
porch.
OK, so maybe I have one thing right.
But the whole thing annoys me because dammit, I’m tired
of having to learn things, tired of people telling me how it all should be
done. Can’t they go away? It’s so bloody intrusive—you open a book and there it
is, the hectoring, the rules, the gentle prodding and tsk-tsking.
And yes, dammit, that’s a word.
Why couldn’t the book have stayed closed?
And why, if it had to be opened, couldn’t the author
have stayed decently on the page, where an author belongs, instead of jumping
out at me, and clinging to my brain?
Is that too much to ask?
Look, even my cats are more civil than that.
They loll in the sunshine, yawn, stretch and most…
Ignore me….
Ahhhhh!
But no no, our busy little author has gotten right down
to work, and that work is ME!
In the general irritation she’s fogged my brain with, I
can’t remember anything specific.
Oh, I am to write.
Every day.
And keep a journal.
And not pretend that the two are the same.
No blook for HER, you see!
But most of the rest of it is jumbled, somehow, in the
brain.
Which is maybe where it should be.
Why can’t I write with my fingers—not my brain?
Oh, and by the way—I know this dodge about serving the
reader. I know, I know—no one is interested in my petty struggles, my
small remarks, my pointless irritations. Grow up!
Suck it in!
Great—did that for the seven lost years of
Christ and guess what!
Don’t ever wanna do it again.
How wayward, how willful I am!
He refuses to see, the nettled Reader cries, that
there’s something else in the world but ME ME ME!
Notice the shift in tone?
Not very well done.
