Further Notes on "The Struggle"

Shrapnel! Shrapnel!
No words after that
Claire said to me
The other day
Don't talk about
Writing - just do
It
And I thought to
Myself, yes, she's
Right about that
I can talk and
Talk forever
Without doing
Anything
Truth be told, I'm
Scared to begin
So weighted down
With fear of failing
That I'm paralyzed
And I've failed before
I've begun
So my goal is anti-
Accomplished
The only way out is
In
The only time is
Now
And again,
Shrapnel!

I don't remember writing this poem sometime early last February, but there it sits, in a nearly empty notebook of thoughts and missives and doodles, right before a page of quotes from a lecture given by Polly Pagenhart, which includes such golden nuggets, as "Events are moments that nominate themselves for reflection," "You discover what you think BY writing", and the always classic, "Shit happens."

What does it all mean? It means that my fear is all bound up in the desire to be good at this writing-business nonsense. It means that the actions we are afraid of are only frightening because we ascribe this Godly importance to them, burden each one with the weight of significance, as if there is only the option to perfect them and failure will unbearably mock us. And that seems great to me -but it's ridiculous. Failure doesn't speak. The mocking is from the mirror where all I see scrawled on my face is "you suck."

Well the mirror has it backward.

Across the table from me, with glassy eyes behind trifocal lenses, Joe looked right past me and directly into his past, reflected in the curved glass of the dining room television. He spoke of all the "Big" moments in his life: how he met his wife, his move from the farmland of North Dakota to California, how he bought his first house, the same one we now sat in eating turkey sandwiches. All those "Big" moments were, paradoxically, small. He met his wife at a wedding (foreshadowing?) and didn't speak to her until a year later. He met a real estate man at a 3 am mass who sold him his first house for $9,700. It dawned on me that not one of these instances was planned, practiced, planned out, prophesied, dwelt upon, or any other form of mental construction that turns so few moments into "Big" ones.

So why should I be so set upon making writing a "Big" process? Why should any of us assign undue grandeur to ideals that may never come to pass and will inevitably overshadow so many flying under the radar? What I am preaching here, more to myself than any of my 5 followers and hundreds of blogspot account-less viewers*, is that "the struggle" is not a mental block or an irrational fear: it is a completely realistic and unflinching affliction of the mind that affects millions of people who live in a fictional dream world where each one is in control of the events around him and here. Freud would be proud of that diagnosis, and would certainly be impressed by my self-realization that I too inhabit this dream world, but would follow that feeling with self-reproach and a re diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder (finally my psychohypochondriasis can end!).

The struggle turns from defeating the unending perfectionism and feelings of incompetence to finding a way out of that mindset. I think Joe, a the young age of 95, is out of that unconscious realm. Time for me to find my way out too.

I have no way to segue into this, but along with the now-daily entries of this blog, accompanied by the presence of a nice photo once in a while, which add flair and hold attention spans steady, I will be writing about old people. No elaboration necessary here except to say that the definition of an "old person" will be questioned.**

Stay tuned. Come meet me outside the entrance of the Dream World and maybe we can grab a churro or something.




*estimation; margin of error, +/- hundreds
**Spoiler Alert! It isn't what you expect!