False Start, or, Full of It
Initially, I was aiming for irony and penitence with this post. I had titled it: “Goodbye.” It was five hundred words typed and revised and revised and revised across the past three days and it still amounted to crap. I wrote about guilt, about not saying goodbye, about leaving “things” dangling; and then I tried rationalizing it all. But it was crap; it was bullshit. I tried to clean it up, but the only way to clean up bullshit… Well, to tell the truth, I’ve never dealt with bullshit, so I wouldn’t know what the fuck to do with it. I imagine a big shovel is involved. So let’s say it wasn’t bullshit; let’s say it was just common, run-of-the-mill human shit. Or dog shit. Whichever kind of shit you like (save for the aforementioned bullshit). And the only way to deal with shit is to bag and trash it, or flush it down the toilet. We all know this. I don’t know why I feel the need to state the obvious. It’s something old folks do and I’m neck-deep in old folks. Oh, yes, that’s right, I suppose you can also use common shit as fertilizer, but I don’t know anything about that, either. I mean, yes, I have a broad understanding of fertilizer; I know it’s good for soil and for planting--but the point is, I’m tired, I’ve wasted way, way too much time and effort on this piece of crap called, “Goodbye,” and now I’ve got to go wash the dishes.
I spent the whole day getting shit out of the way to concentrate on this, my big reintroduction to the blogosphere. And now all I want to do is start over. And I tried starting over. I wrote: “I must wash the dishes before the bugs get at them.” It went something like that. It was something about washing dishes and deterring bugs. It had nothing to do with penitence or saying, “Goodbye” as an “ironic” way to say, “Hello.” But that, too (about the dishes and the bugs) was bullshit (although a pile of dirty dishes are, in fact, presently waiting for me downstairs--okay, not a pile, but there’s enough of them to bug me). So I’m going to pull something out of the past, some silly stupid thing that I haven’t used before, and I pray that it will be more entertaining than this. Of course, given the order of things, you will have likely read that first (unless you are reading this at 12:01 AM on 1/01/10). I suppose I could warn you.
Nah.
And now I really do have to go wash those dishes. I’m serious about keeping the bugs at bay and I do a God damned good job of it, too. It’s quite possibly the only thing I do well. Perhaps my future lies with Orkin.
Before I go, I’d like to share a memory that popped into my mind a minute ago (to be honest, it’s my mother’s memory; I have no personal recollection of it):
On a summer afternoon in 1977, I led my mother to a semi-circle of bushes in the corner of the school playground. I pointed at something heaped in the clearing and, so proud of myself, I cried, “Mommy! Mommy! Look what I made!” Three decades later, I’m still adept at making it; but it was it really God’s intention for more of it to come out of my brain than out of my tush?
I spent the whole day getting shit out of the way to concentrate on this, my big reintroduction to the blogosphere. And now all I want to do is start over. And I tried starting over. I wrote: “I must wash the dishes before the bugs get at them.” It went something like that. It was something about washing dishes and deterring bugs. It had nothing to do with penitence or saying, “Goodbye” as an “ironic” way to say, “Hello.” But that, too (about the dishes and the bugs) was bullshit (although a pile of dirty dishes are, in fact, presently waiting for me downstairs--okay, not a pile, but there’s enough of them to bug me). So I’m going to pull something out of the past, some silly stupid thing that I haven’t used before, and I pray that it will be more entertaining than this. Of course, given the order of things, you will have likely read that first (unless you are reading this at 12:01 AM on 1/01/10). I suppose I could warn you.
Nah.
And now I really do have to go wash those dishes. I’m serious about keeping the bugs at bay and I do a God damned good job of it, too. It’s quite possibly the only thing I do well. Perhaps my future lies with Orkin.
Before I go, I’d like to share a memory that popped into my mind a minute ago (to be honest, it’s my mother’s memory; I have no personal recollection of it):
On a summer afternoon in 1977, I led my mother to a semi-circle of bushes in the corner of the school playground. I pointed at something heaped in the clearing and, so proud of myself, I cried, “Mommy! Mommy! Look what I made!” Three decades later, I’m still adept at making it; but it was it really God’s intention for more of it to come out of my brain than out of my tush?