El Pensador

Filling this space is so hard. All the nothing on the page is intimidating, a constant chastising display of just how much I haven't written. But the only thing more played out than writers writing about writing is writers writing about not writing, so let's continue.

Getting my thoughts down helps me organize them, but it also serves to memorialize those ideas that have been swirling through my head to long. Nothing tombstones a nagging notion like seeing it written down, cast in the closest thing the internet offers to stone. Right now, I find myself dilemma-sick, thinking about the girl who doesn't read my blog anymore and also I used to fuck. In the hierarchy of non-fictive tedium, writers writing about not writing is superseded by people writing about heartbreak, and I'm eager to reach my nadir.

Even with her (or me, perspective-dependent) exiled to the land of wind and ghosts, all the extant memories keep floating in my preconscious, waiting to break into the waking world. Only time will serve to exorcise her shade, but the future seems more distant mid-haunting. (I might've rode the ghost metaphor farther than its spectral legs could carry it.)

The trouble, I suppose, is knowing when to feel like I'm out of the woods. Most patients are unfit to diagnose themselves, and I'm no different. Quite frankly, I hesitate to even admit to heartsickness, out of some combination of emotional constipation and a desire to win the breakup. And there are the relics of the era newly bygone. There was a picture:

A Valentine's day present, and the one thing I feel unsafe getting rid of. Because maybe she's already deleted her copy, and then it'll simply cease to be. So I keep it.

But I can't reconcile being a romantic with being a realist. Because I know that I didn't cry when I saw that picture two months ago. And I have a feeling that six months from now it'll only elicit a bitter flip of nostalgia. So the practical concerns (what to do now, I can honestly do better, let this be the end) are fighting in the streets with Love and its discontents (images of wonderful times now impossible to recreate, the desire to find a way back into the relationship, and every variety of pang). I'm falling prey to the sunk cost fallacy in a big, bad way, pining for something which was intermittently great and often unappetizing. But that's the nature of the thing.

The pithy line I used to summarize it to her, stolen from Civilization V's translation of Aristotle: "Time crumbles things; everything grows old and is forgotten under the power of time." But I wouldn't like this post ending with something that grand; it's inappropriate. I've discovered heartbreak in much the same way people "discover" restaurants - it was there the whole time, you just hadn't walked in. I'd love to end with a bit of "The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator", a poem as tailor-made for me as any could be, but I truthfully don't particularly resent the glimmering creatures who make a feast of each other tonight. Also, even at the end of my rope, I can't help but get douche chills at the idea of posting poems on my blog.

It's good to be back.

Don't Even Bang Unless You Plan to Hit Something

I got a girl, and I gave her the keys to this blog. It wasn't quite a mistake, no, but the beauty of the secret blog is that it serves as a receptacle for my most unrepeatable thoughts. I can't really let 'er rip if I know somebody's reading who shares a bed with my on occasion - at least, not without frisking them for weapons before lights-out. So I let this blog become fallow, its mix of diary entries and angry rants festering from a lack of attention.

So she dumps me, and now I come crawling back. Typical, right? See, I switched my major, from English to Chemistry. Part of me worried that my words had been sacrificed when I chose to pursue a career whose promised future was more than $20K a year and cheese sandwiches. But I guess I can still torture a metaphor and craft a run-on like a motherfucker. I've become more masculine, but my writing remains as unsure as ever. I'm sure Ezra Pound would cluck his tongue if a gang of feminist critics hadn't dug him up and nailed it to a red wheelbarrow. Ah, well.