Thursday, March 6, 2008

Me

Cosmo Brown: Talking pictures, that means I'm out of a job. At last I can start suffering and write that symphony.
R.F. Simpson: You're not out of job, we're putting you in as head of our new music department.
Cosmo Brown: Oh, thanks, R.F.! At last I can stop suffering and write that symphony.

From Singing in the Rain

So when times get hectic – when I find that I am just way too behind on my “things that must be completed today” list – blog posting is one of the first optional activities that gets chucked. It’s either write or sleep, and since I tend to run on way too little sleep as it is, choosing the latter would almost certainly result in me getting wretchedly sick, or in a horrible car wreck, or both.
But the ideas just keep coming. I’ll be toodling along through life, minding my own business, when an idea will strike; some interesting juxtaposition of events, a remarkable metaphor, some theological connection. I will then have the urge to write about it. I will often scribble the basic outline in my legal pad that I keep with me for business. Then I look for time to write. Days pass. Other ideas float to the top. More days go by. The ideas pile up but then start to get lost. They end up drifting into the piles on my desk, or to the floor of my car, or into the recycling bin. Then when I do find a half hour that I can justify writing, I sit here and wonder where all those great ideas went.
Ah, the life a great artiste intellectualle is so fraught with hardship. What is a genius to do?
Why, write about himself, of course! The self-referential writer is the most pitiful of all creatures. It's like living in some depression era Mickey Rooney flick, where it's all about the actors having trouble getting their movie made.
So here I am, writing about me writing about me. I keep thinking that if I do this long enough, the fabric of the space-time continuum will open up and I will sucked into the interstitial space between dimensions. Then I should have plenty of time to write my magnum opus.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just assumed you had given up blogging for Lent.
Ron

Anonymous said...

AVI emails the ideas to our home computer. Would that help?