Where I'm From

     A few years ago I lost the urge to read. 

     This should have comforted me, what with reading being such an aberrant activity these days, but it didn't, for I actually liked to read.  In fact, I was one of our more voracious consumers of the printed word.  As a youngster I read through our public library's young adult section before my age reached double-digits.  As a teenager I leaned heavily -- too heavily, some would say -- on the transporting qualities of books.  They were my mind-altering drugs, my escape hatch, my tortoise shell, my ticket out of smallsville.  College, for me, consisted of a dorm room, a dining hall and this gigantic library filled with millions of books just waiting to be read.  Classrooms?  What classrooms?  How vividly I recall the high water mark -- or was it the nadir -- of my collegiate career, that time I pulled an all-nighter before an economics final reading P.G. Wodehouse.

     Books followed me out into the real world, keeping my mind afloat as my socioeconomic status plunged, dragged down by a series of dead-end jobs.  Then just as I managed to turn things around, they invented Amazon, allowing me to feed my habit with the highest-grade stuff around.  Nirvana.

     Although I often worked twelve hour days, I never stopped reading, sneaking in a few chapters before dawn, reading in the bathroom, reading at my desk while others went out to lunch, reading while the TV blared, reading late at night after they fell asleep.  I really liked to read. 

     Then it died.  It wasn't that I was seeing someone else or spending my time elsewhere.  I'd filtered TV, radio, magazines and newspapers out of my life to make room for books (and family and job, of course).  It wasn't that I'd read everything I'd wanted to read -- my TBR list had never been longer or more interesting.  And it wasn't that I'd hit a wall while trying to plow through Gravity's Rainbow -- I did hit a wall, and it was painful, but that had happened years before the day my reading died, years filled with hundreds of other happily-thumbed books.

     So what happened?  I'd started deconstructing books while reading them, taking them apart, figuring out how they worked. I engaged in a running dialogue with the author, second-guessing each page's decisions, wondering how it would look if we went here instead of there.  Sort of like watching a DVD with an annoying commentary track.  That's what went on in my head as I read.  I mentally revised the bad stuff while reading it.  I resented the good stuff.  In short, my need to read had been tossed aside by a stronger need to write.

     It took me years to recognize the symptoms, for outside of the odd piece for the school paper, I'd never written before.  I certainly never saw myself as a writer.  I hadn't taken an English class since high school.  My last writing class was probably in eighth grade.

     Then I discovered blogs.  Then I started Outer Life.  Then I hunted and pecked for a while until sometime last year I hit a vein and words just started gushing out.  Although I still work those twelve hour days, I now rise before the dawn to write, I write at lunchtime, I write while others watch TV, I write after they fall asleep.  And when I'm not writing, I'm thinking about writing.  I really like to write.  Which is good, because I really need to write. 

     I'm not the most balanced guy in the world, that's for sure.

     Now I'm afraid the writing will die, for I'm starting to analyze it, asking questions I cannot answer. 

     Why must I write?  I don't know.  I'm anonymous, so it isn't fame.  I'm giving it away, so it isn't money.  I've actually felt relieved, lately, as my readership declines, so it isn't an ego trip.  I'd like to think it's because I have something to say, but to be honest I have no idea what that something is.  So what is it that compels me to do this?  I don't know. 

     Am I writing this for me or for you?  I don't know.  Everyone says write to please yourself, and I do, but then why must I post my writing for all the world to see?  If it was just for me, you'd think I'd be happy leaving it in the desk drawer.  But I'm not.  If it's for you I'm writing this, then why do I so assiduously ignore you, looking inside myself for my topics, rambling on and on about me me me in excruciatingly long posts like this one?  I know what you like, most of you that is, and I'm pretty sure this isn't it.  I suppose I could write shorter pieces that made you laugh and made you think, but that wouldn't satisfy the urge that makes me write.  What's going on?  I don't know.

     I truly believe I am unimportant, yet I've built an online shrine to myself.  I can't believe you care, yet I write as if you do.  I'm the most private person I know, yet I routinely spill my guts in front of the world.  The writing is therapeutic, yet I've never felt more unhinged.  The more I ask, the less I answer.  The mystery just deepens. 

     Most ominously for the writing, I've started reading again.  Not much, mind you, for every page I read is one less page I write, but the books are pulling me like they used to, my TBR pile topped with fresh new acquisitions calling out to me as I type this, urging me to return once again to their pleasures.  This could be the first sign of a heretofore unseen balance in my life.  Perhaps I'm moving towards a happy medium of writing and reading.  Or maybe it's the first sign of a return to the old imbalance, my mental seesaw tipping away from writing and into reading again. 

     That's where I'm from.  Where I'm going, I have no idea.

Comments

[joshua]

Ours is not to reason why... it's an ebb and flow, the patterns of consumption and creation. Before your well was full and you needed to draw from the well. Perhaps now, you need to fill the well again.

[Melinama]

Great questions I'm sure a lot of us ask. Don't you think novelists (those who aren't convinced they're making their fortune) ask themselves the same questions? Or painters? Or composers? It's just - in there and it wants to come out.

[Cindy]

Please don't stop writing...

[shank]

Those were all good questions, but the only one I'm left with after reading that entry is: What the hell does 'assiduously' mean?

[Debra]

After reading your post today it came to me
why I love reading your blog. It’s like hearing
another person thinking their own private thoughts.

There is a part of me that wants to just
scream back to you….

STOP putting yourself down

STOP naming other blogs and sites as ‘Better’

But then I realize that I am only an observer to
your inner life.

To quote the title of a movie that I just watched this
past weekend….

“What the BLEEP do we know” ?

[Waterfall]

Sounds like you're in a really good place.

I think that, even though you're writing about "me me me," you're writing about something more universal, something more common to all of us, some human-experience type of thing with which your readers identify. I for one feel that your "me me me" writings are, in some sense, "us us us" writings. I wouldn't read you if I didn't feel like your essays--the humorous and serious ones alike--somehow spoke to something deep within, something that only good writers are able to awaken and inspire.

I know this sounds like so much brown-nosing of a blogger whose real name I don't even know, but I'm serious. Glad to see you're reading again!

[DarkoV]

There's nothing like a touch of self-doubt with a dollop of a suggestion that you may pull back the writing to get the female readers all in a knot. You wield a mighty strong musk with your writing, Mr. OL.

What's called for (and reading of the last month of entries acts as sufficient proof) is for you to get into that car of phantasmsgoric power and style that you've sung praises of in earlier posts. Roll up your trousers. Fill up the tank. And drive until the "E" is begging for attention.

Then.
Come on back to your spectating fans and concoct another entry.
Vroom. Vroom!

[andrew]

The act of writing can be like a bow and arrow in your hands,

for some it is the mere tension from drawing of the bow, and the sing of the bowstring as it releases, that is enough, who cares about where the the arrow lands, (those are the writers who tend to merely fill their own private notebooks).

For many of us though, we care about a target, & what becomes of our words after the release of writing, we draw, and fire out into the dark, and hope it "hits" and that our words have impact, that someone else can pick up that arrow, and be inspired from our moment, or to fire it again (maybe even right back at us).

Reading was your years of training learning how to draw the bow of thought. Reading like you said you did probably organized parts of your thinking ability so that you could create the wonderful writing and thinking I have admired here for quite a while.

But now you write, you shoot; there is nothing wrong with caring about that. But is writing and reading the same place in you? is there room for both? The same neurons wound up and strung towards the idea, an idea you write or idea you read? is there room for both?

Who knows what the answer is for you, but for many, including myself, what we read clearly leaves a positive mark on how we write, it influences how we string our bow, although the targets & choices are still our own.

One of your older posts, "filtered" clearly talked about when you cut off TV, then you were "finally maturing into the oddity I've been all along"

I love that, (and that line in particular) and believe reading does not get in the way of the odd self, not in the way many other forms of mental input like TV does, reading might even encourage the odd self.. Reading invites, cajoles, swirls you up, puts that arrow in your hands and says, "its all yours, now what?"

stay odd, read, write, & rock on...

[R J Keefe]

Discovering your Web log this afternoon has refreshed sagging spirits. I don't think that I have ever seen a better account of the birth of a writer.

[Tiny Coconut]

But you're not just rambling on about youyouyou; you're also rambling (in the best possible, finding the unbeaten path kind of way) about mememe. Which is why we come back, and why we read, and sometimes why we're mostly silent, because we have nothing more to say than, "Yes!" or "Me too!" or "Thank you for saying it better than I ever could."

As for what is happening, well, my first thought was not, "Oh, we're going to lose him to the books again." It was, "Ah, he's analyzing his own writing. He's ready for something more. He's ready for the next step." You're the only one who knows what that step is, though it probably won't be clear to you until you've already taken it.