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Please, Kill This Letter

One single slip, and a slip cannot be avoided, will stop the whole process, easy and painful alike, and I will have to shrink back into my own circle again.—“Resolutions.” By Franz Kafka Who am I writing to? To you, whatever bored soul that reads this or to this lingering ghost of life wandering the cobweb decorated halls of this body? Does it matter? Consider this a letter. Not a message in a bottle, for that implies that I want it to be found, to be read. No, a letter can be lost with all the other messages, heaped together will all sorts of words. Words of enticement, words of threatening, words of encouragement, words of love. In the bottle, the message becomes the sole objective, the sole fact. You see, I want to be lost. The message leads like a map back to the writer, but I do not want to be found. The letter comes bearing its genesis on its envelope, and, since we know its history, we do not care to visit the address. To be invisible is to be seen. G.K Chesterton’s de
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Voice

There is a popular internet meme I see passed along authors on Facebook. It is a cute little cartoon of a kind English teacher handing back a story to a young child with the caption: “This is really good. You should think about becoming a writer.” The punchline of the meme is underneath the cartoon, which goes thusly: “And therefore little Anne’s life was ruined.” Certainly, anyone who has wanted to make writing into a life’s passion sees the dark humor embedded within this simple meme. However, what does make writing so hard that we can make jokes about its destructive tendencies in a writer’s life? Perhaps it is the lack of monetary security. Even the most famous authors cannot rest on their laurels. Very few can afford to retire on their New York Times bestsellers. Nonetheless, many occupations require equal amounts of intensive labor with little monetary reward. Watching my parents operate a farm thought me this, that one should not fall into the hubris that writing is the hardes
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(Con)text

Two years. For two years I have let this blog reside in ambiguous tension. Will I return? Will I start a new blog? How does time pass in the domain of the internet? Perhaps the last question is more for my own curiosity than germane to the particular wrong I have done to this offspring of my intellect. I reread the introduction and I find it somewhat charming how I attempt to sound witty and hip. What was the context of the creation of this blog? Why did I even make it if I would abandon it after just one post? I suppose I did warn my future self that I am lackadaisical to such endeavors. Maybe even life itself. I did want to be an author. I still think I do, though my heart seems to stumble in the dark about the concept. What exactly is my ambition about this whole blog, which, I could expand to encompass what ambitions do I have for life itself. What is my motivation for writing? For Montaigne, it was to capture the babbling brook of the self, a fisher of words if you will, atte
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Introduction etc.

I should have paid for WordPress. I should customize my blog to reflect myself and portray a person at least trying to have a successful blog, but I’m notoriously lazy. Instead, I created a free blog, planning on using every stock image and font they give me.  Perhaps I should be more fair to myself and say that this is just me being economical, yet I prefer linguistic flagellation. People find scars more cooler anyway. Take Snake from the Metal Gear series, for example. He has a prosthetic arm and an eye patch, but no one is ready to give him the blue handicap card for his helicopter. Instead, Snake is a total badass. In truth, the eye patch probably constitutes the majority of the cool factor despite his prosthetic arm’s ability to launch like a rocket. It is peculiar, no matter how you slice it, that an eye patch, which indicates the loss of an eye, looks so damn cool. I admit that I would like an eye patch, though I know an eye must be sacrificed. Why? Because an eye patc
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