It’s a bit of a blank character. I’m a document and there is a cat on my lap. I cannot get up. That would be to break the divine contract between man and beast. Loyal beast. The only one who loves me at this moment. There are others who love me but they are filing papers or digging weeds in the garden and so they are not focused on me. My sense of love is one that requires constant focus on me for me to feel it. The cat is (the cat has clicked my mouse while I was at the end of paragraph 2, so now this is the point I must continue from. This might be interesting to look back on, but most likely no one will. It is not an interesting choice, is it? To just follow the demands of chance is a choice, but how much credit can one receive for choosing inaction? A man who wins the lottery does not deserve the same praise as a small business owner who turned a hobby into an empire. Not that my cat is going to turn this paragraph into an empire; just an expierence to be examined. I doubt I will be the examiner, though. I consider myself reflective, but I have such trouble looking back on my own writing. This exercise is an indulgence, if anything, as it removes any blame from my editing skills.
I feel like starting a new paragraph even though I am still within the cat-click parenthetical. There’s really no hope in following that train of thought anymore. I’m just chasing the word “small” across the screen over and over again, killing time until some other interference puts me onto a new track. Oddly, the thought that keeps recurring to me while I waste our time is whether or not I will publish this on Harmless Writing. That’s the kind of self indulgence that concerns me. On the one hand it clearly shows my craving for attention, but… oh dear the cat’s moved again. Her fuzzy butt is on the mouse. I don’t think I’ve jumped cursor though. Where was I? Worried about craving attention. Is that what the blog is? I don’t get sad about the small view numbers — especially when I’ve failed to p (woops, this misclick is my fault, not the cat’s. I can’t bare to go deeper into self indlugence, though, so I’m going to try and pickup where I was talking about Mrs. Dalloway. Sorry.) ut out a story for several months. I know I force Nickie and my mom to read the stories, and they are the pople I’m most interested in talking to anyway. It’s less of an attention seeking activity than it is a measure of my own motivation. The boundary between “folder of junk I typed” and “piece of work” is at its thinnest when pushing prose out to a blog. Still, the ability for others to find it is enough to make me healthily self concious about something other than my feeling of worthlessnes for having not put out any work. It’s trading one anxiety for another, but it’s definitely an upgrade.
That fear of judgement hits me now as I wonder about the consequences of publishing this. I think of some would-be reader stumbling across the first post: a bunch of goblledygook with misspellings and no structure. It’s nothing you couldn’t get from a highschool english class that just read Mrs. Dalloway. The worst part is I paused before writing that book title because I wanted to say “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” though I knew that was wrong. I haven’t read Lady Chat, so I don’t know why it jumped into my mind. I have read Dalloway, though not all the way through. I was supposed to read it for a college english class but by the time the class came around I had only just skimmed the final third. The only interesting stuff happens in the final third. Ok, I’ve jumped back to here. Anyway, I just skimmed the end and picked out quotes during the classroom discussion, and yet I still felt I understood the book better than anyone else in that class. That’s mainly because there were some real dumbos, thogh, who always drown out the people I was interested in talking to. I can’t remember much of the book now, anyway. I just remember feeling smart in that discussion and a bit dissappointed in everyone else. Maybe they didn’t read it either — there’s always those times of year when everyone defers things as “close enough” in the joint assumption that no one else is putting in the effort anyway. I like to be the person is pushed through that kind of week defense, but I’m not. I’m not.
Pause.
Pause to cheat.
Pause to think of something interesting to say. Only, instead of thinking of that I thought about leftover pizza in the fridge and how I might get some coffee. Mom, I’m out of coffee beans. Thanks in advance.
Well now I have to put this on the blog now — I’ve included a shoutout to my mom that will really tickle her fancy.) small but she makesa pleasant weight on my ribs that reminds me she is focused on loving me. And yes she is an animal and her love of me is as much a love of warmth as it as a sign of commitment. So I could be a warm machine and she would sit just the same. I am soft, though. I pet. She reaches out and yawns; that is her loving embrace. And that is all there is.
(Ah! Too much cat but. I ended up here. Though at least it’s on a blank line instead of in a paragraph again. Who knows when I reset and delete this somehow. Perhaps it’s time to end and get some of that pizza. I haven’t had coffee today. I’ve earned coffee, I think.)
It’s too many “ands” up there. That’s the part of my writing style I’m most concerned about. I like to run on. I don’t put complex ideas into sentences, I just chain together a bunch of simple ideas with “ands”. I’ll never be a deep thinker. I’ll never be an interesting writer. Certainly not an “author” by any measure. What do you think, cat? You’ve shifted precarously to rest your cheek on my hand and now I can’t reach the delete key without jarring you. I suppose that’s one reason for writing stream-of-concious. And of course I’ve cheated and deleted. The cat has already moved her head, distracted by some phantom bird outside the window, and I’ve taken that chance to throw in a missing apostrophe or delete the extra “h” I put in “apostrophe”.
Harmless Writing 