Writing. Hell, it’s a frustrating existence.
(One to which I’ve become happily accustomed.)
Why do it?
This is a question I ask myself daily. After all, writing a novel is not a quick process. When an idea is imagined, it comes with a creative adrenalin rush. So, if there is an answer to this question: Why do it? My answer is simply that it’s not under my control. It’s like an itch in an impossible place to reach.
To this day, I type using two fingers, a system that hasn’t changed for me in sixty years, since being ten years old, typing through the night, pressing my index finger softly on the keys of dad’s Smith-Corona typewriter so as not to wake anyone. I was always fascinated with who I could be on the page and not who I was. Writing only enabled this sickness.
Following those years after escaping the island, I never gave myself the luxury of purchasing a machine to type my words and wrote down ideas freehand. Back then, it was called cursive writing, no longer trending in many schools.
In my twenties, as a young activist with Greenpeace, I would lie in a bunk bed, some nights shivering, toes tucked up, pants hanging off the edge of the bunk, drying, and with trembling fingers wrote my thoughts in a journal. Those were days when I had excellent eyesight in the dark, was strong of muscle, and I remembered things…but hell, that was way back then.
I still use two fingers today, tapping out words on my iPhone, but everything else is different. I don’t shiver in bed anymore or hang wet pants out to dry, but I still sniff out the ocean’s salty sea air coming in from the windows of the place I now call home.
I should be happy; my lifestyle is not ugly…it isn’t what I once told myself it should be…what I felt it promised. The loves of my life taken too early, their affection no longer to be counted on for inspiration. But what writer, what person, hasn’t suffered a deeply felt tragedy or built a castle in the sand and seen it washed away?
My writing suffered by living so long with the mundane. Now, deeply in love again, secure, having everything a man needs, thriving in a changing world, no longer beaten up by self-pity, I walk with my face toward the sun.
Once the universe shone adventure, the intoxication of new seas pulling me from land, glimpsing the shining backbone of a leviathan making its way south, and friends who roughed me up for no other reason than I wrote poetry. I don’t get roughed up anymore, only beaten up by the IRS.
So, I keep the faith, still believe in love, hold onto the reality of my life, and keep close the memories.
But it’s often a struggle, one I’m losing, like a drowning man grasping for anything that will keep him afloat a little longer. A drowning writer doesn’t discriminate on who or what it is that keeps his head above water.
For me, it’s two fingers.
I use them on a cell screen keyboard to dream my ideas back to life. The one thing I’m sure about is that people don’t stop by my posts to read what I’ve written with the purpose they might learn something about writing. I never learned to write, I just wrote. I kept pounding two fingers on letters to make words, to form sentences, build paragraphs, sometimes dreaming, living the hurt, and the high times, but whatever, I keep pounding down on lettered keys.
I’ve never sought to imitate, never went to writers’ working classes, never learned from books. My grammar sucks, my editing skills don’t exist, but something…something…keeps me beating down on the keys.
It’s not fame, not money. I don’t write as a therapy, and I certainly don’t write for myself, what would be the point of that?
I write to share.
I write because I want to share something, maybe something of myself, perhaps something I learned, something…always something…and I never really understood what it is I’m sharing.
Ultimately, I never want to waste your time visiting.
If I didn’t on this occasion, then know that my two fingers are supremely happy…but more than that, it’s nice to know I’m not going to get roughed up for my inadequacies.
