Blog Miscellany

For years I've had this story in my head - it's about a boy I knew while in high school.  I've told bits and pieces of this story to friends, at parties, when I'm sitting around and want to make myself sad, but I've never written it down as a whole thing because I didn't know how.  Not that I can't write what I speak, but I couldn't put it on paper or in a computer and make it feel the way it feels to me in my heart or in my head.  It's a good narrative, but an awful story - a hard story that might be best left untold. 

In preparation for telling this story I picked up another book of poetry by Sherman Alexie.  It's called One Stick Song and in four pages I knew how to tell my story - I knew what feeling I needed to put into it.  Always before I've been trying to tell this story from the boy's point of view, a first person account of his life.  The trouble was that I don't know how he felt and no matter how good a writer I might think myself to be I couldn't imagine his emotions.  I know my emotions though.  I know the horror glasses through which I viewed his situation and the anger it evoked.  I'm telling the story as my story, as a friend and witness.

The first installment of this tale will be on my blog tomorrow.

I enjoy writing these stories because they're true and the words flow from my mind easier than fiction because I'm remembering and reliving.  I enjoy this style of writing . . . maybe too much.  Maybe it's hurting my fiction writing because this is so easy and that's so hard.

Want to know who comes to this blog on searches?  I do.  Some of the search terms that have led people here give a glimpse into a disturbed world and bring troubled touches to my blog:

Naked Boy Scout
"she asked me to have sex with her"
Vonnegut Castration
Rick Boy  (now this one is searched a lot - 10 times a week or more)
Military Virgin "with big biceps"
Masonic Gang Stalking

Those are some of the search terms that I've seen.  Maybe I should just put a lot of freaky shit in one post sometime and see what bees that honey brings in.

Speaking of this blog, I made a promise to myself to put up a post a day in the month of May (see, I'm a poet too) and with this post I've done it.  Tomorrow's is already written and scheduled to go.  Despite this being my busiest month ever, I have managed to sit down and create content every day.  Not as a contest or a challenge from anyone else . . . but from me - to me.  Writing is a habit.  I need good habits.

Sherman Alexie is a poet, he says.  But not just him.  The New York Times says he's a poet and so does the Harvard Review.  I read his work and I think less about poetry and more about essential truth.  There's not much form or structure except that which makes the words fit into interesting columns on the page - yet I read him and love the words, feel the emotion he's conveying.  If that's what a poet is, then I agree.  But it's not that his words are beautiful, or that he scours the thesaurus for the perfect metaphor, because he can't.  Not him.  He just can't.  I envision him sitting down and writing about a subject - water, sex, old trucks - and then looking at what he wrote and feeling relieved that it's out of his head and now other people will have to read it while he can forget it. He lets it go into the world, freeing himself of those constraints. 

If that's poetry, then he's my favorite.

- rick, blogging

Comments

[a rose is a rose]

thanks for the 30 days (so far) and one more tomorrow -

it will be a blue moon tomorrow too

(p.s. - i LIKE coming here)

(p.p.s. - perhaps one day all of us should make a listing of the search terms people use to come to our blogs. i'll bet it will make for a laugh or two)

[Success Warrior]

A post a day keeps SW away.

From putting up wild things in your comments section, that is.

[Sideon]

Writing is a good thing. Congrats on keeping your commitment. I watched May come and go without worrying about blogging too much. In the back of my mind, story installments were half written and revised, but the real world took precedence: trips, meeting fellow bloggers (SML!), family, yardwork, and my partner.

"I know the horror glasses through which I viewed his situation and the anger it evoked." Tell your story.

[Sideon]

I forgot to include the ever-important word:

Please!

[SML]

Yeah. I did a-post-a-day blogging last November and it about killed my muse. Never again. But lately, it seems I could stand to write more.

Today I had a fleeting thought of a PERFECT blog post, only to forget it seconds later. I hate it when that happens!

I look forward to tomorrow. I'm very glad you were able to get it out in writing.

[mark]

well, you knew sex would sell...

[CV Rick]

S.W. .. . if that's all it takes to keep you away I should've been blogging years ago.

Sideon, my story has begun. I think there's probably 5 or 6 installments to Alma the Lamanite coming over the next month. I hope it's the story that's in my mind.

SML . . . I don't have a muse. I just keep writing and writing and writing. Besides this autobiographical work, I have hundreds of fiction ideas and at least a couple new ones every day.