sweet nothings

Do you ever just write to hear the familiar tapping of the keys? or even to have the feel of a pen move across a page? These are the things that are musical to me. It is a great comfort when I knowingly sit down to expel the voices in my head. This is their incarceration. The sentence: to hold my thoughts for as long as this minute rambling might last, and perhaps even be remembered by a few individuals who actually take a moment to read and digest my thoughts. It seems like we've been having a fun time getting to know one another.

I've really struggled with writing over the last few years. I can remember a time that I would sit down and write stories by the pound. I was diagnosed with having an overactive imagination as a child (that meant that I lied a lot and got away with it most of the time. heh.) Fantasy and reality were mingled to where, at times, even I didn't know whether I was speaking the truth. And I wrote. Mostly for fun though. The times when I had to write for assignment, I turned out the same tedious papers as other students. But then there was drama class and I wrote my first one act, and the teacher liked it so much she received permission to put on the small production for a portion of the school. It was about drugs and aliens and I got to direct - fun stuff. I didn't really think a whole lot about it in highschool. Hell, since the fourth grade I had assumed that I would become a physician. It was a life long dream. And then college came and I realized that the schools of math and science were full of suck asses. I'm definitely not a suck ass. I just couldn't put up with all the bullshit these people were putting themselves through -- especially not for a couple of dollars.

So I decided that I would become a writer. of some sort. And since then I've struggled with this conundrum between myself and the art -- and financing it. I really have this ethical issue with being paid for putting words in sequence. There's no justification in my mind. (plus I really loathe the fiction that reeks of money.) And so I've considered writing academically. I'm a decent non-fiction writer, especially if I'm passionate about the subject matter -- and this would fall into a larger plan of continuing academically until I'm no longer the student but the professor. But then there's that financing bug again. So, how do you pay for all this? And so I write. without much of an outlet.

Idealistically I would get an old press and make my books from scratch and give them away to the world to read. But that's dreaming. and I am a dreamer. My mother likes to warn me that if I continue with the mindset that I currently hold that I'll probably end up "living in a van down by the river." And I like to tell her that as long as I'm happy and writing and getting read that it won't matter to me at all. That I would like to live this life completely serving others - to hell with myself. heh. That gets her fundamentalist thinking in a bind. Anyway, I guess that I just wanted to tell you that words have become so important to me lately. And in a way, I suppose they always have been.

I don't really have a way to tie up my thoughts at all, so here's a thought from a fellow poet:

"Every word that we utter was given to us by another; it is the assemblage of those words that makes them our own."
~August West

-d.