The Blockhead

Writing? Why, there's hardly anything to it. Writing is just a matter of thinking honestly while Emacs happens to be open: the process of refining one's own thoughts is sufficiently tightly linked to the faculty of language, that the further step of presenting the product of those thoughts to others is largely a matter of muscle memory.

Thinking honestly is torture.

At least, that's what one would infer from observation of the lengths people will go to avoid it. If a creature performs the behavior of making noises that superficially resemble the English words, "I have a great deal of things to say about sex and gender and Society and statistics, actual substantive insights that have been building up inside my head these sixteen years, insights that other people will actually want to read, and that could actually have a positive effect on the world, however comparatively small, by means of helping people make better gender-related life decisions, even if I can't predict in advance just what those decisions will be," and yet the creature's daily activities systematically fail to include the production of text, if it recoils in horror from an empty Emacs buffer as from a predator—it would be naïve overinterpretation in the extreme to take all this to mean that the creature does, in fact, have a great deal of things to say about sex and gender, &c., but that it has somehow been obstructed from expressing them. (Obstructed by what?)

More parsimoniously: the creature is confused. Having fled from the responsibility of thinking honestly, which is the source of all meaning, its noises don't necessarily signify anything, however much they might sound like language.

I am to turn 30 in scarcely a month. The savings from my last dayjob aren't going to last indefinitely. I don't want to live in a world where youth is wasted on the young, life is wasted on the living, health and wealth are wasted on the same. I want my character arc for 2017 to make sense: I want the pain and disturbance of my recent madness to have meant something, and the way you make pain mean something is by channeling it into some grand endeavor, unifying past and present under a theme and the promise of a decrease in future pain or increase in future beauty.

And that, for me, here, now, means writing as a business, writing as spiritual practice, writing as warfare, writing as computation, writing as whatever goddamned metaphor puts words on the goddamned screen already.

Not sitting around reading the subreddit comments, watching funny YouTube clips, and dying of Parkinson's disease.

No, not that Parkinson's. The other one.