Tag Archives: Writing

Saying the same thing over and over and over

I’ve gotten to a weird point here. I’ll sit down to write a couple of these essays every day. Usually I just kind of set my mind to shuffle, like I’ll to clear out all of the excess chatter until something close to an idea emerges, and then I just barrel through. But lately I’ve found myself questioning the whole process. Namely, every time I have a good idea, I think to myself, have I already done something like this before?

I don’t want to keep saying the same thing over and over again. I don’t want to be that guy that keeps repeating the same jokes. But sometimes, I don’t know. Sometimes the basis for one of these blog posts will be something out of real life. And here’s where it gets tricky, because in real life I’m constantly making the same jokes and saying the same things over and over again.

It’s kind of lame, yeah, it totally is. But if I think of a joke, a good joke, a bad joke, whatever, something that I find even slightly amusing, I’ll want to share it. Maybe that’s fine, maybe that sucks for whoever I happen to be around, I can’t really tell. But I know that, for example, at work, if I come up with something funny, I’ll try it out on one person. If I get a good response, or any response at all, I’ll feel better about it, but I’m not satisfied. What if that person was just being polite? What if that person was looking for a quick way out of the interaction, and decided that a quick laugh would be just the trick to stroke my sense of self-satisfaction long enough to make an exit?

So I’ll say it to the first person, and then I’ll do it again. And then if I deem the joke or the story or the prank or whatever a success, then I know I’m in a good spot. Like I know at work, where I work with like thirty or forty other people, that that’s a lot of potential for some solid joking around. And so I’ll say it to one person, and then two people, and then five. And then after that I’ll have the joke down, like it’s in my head. And maybe it’ll be a situational joke. But situations will arise and, because the joke is so in my head, so at the tip of my tongue, I’ll be finding ever more ways to lay it on.

And after ten, fifteen times, I start to have doubts, specifically, how many times have I told this joke, and to who?* After a while, maybe the laughs will die down. Or maybe they won’t die down, but I’ll detect something, a fakeness to the laughter, a willingness to leave abruptly after I’ve told the joke. Or maybe somebody won’t think it’s funny at all, and I’ll ask them, “I’m sorry, have I told you this already?”

And maybe they’ll laugh and say, “Yes, Rob, you’ve already told me this.” In which case, we can both have a laugh at the joke’s expense, at its overuse. And maybe that’ll be a sign that I should pull back on that joke, maybe put it on pause for a little bit, save it for times when I’m only around certain people who I’m positive haven’t heard it before. And I should probably make sure that they’re not friends with people who I’ve told the joke to, just in case they’re both talking one day, and one of them says to the other, “Hey, Rob told me this great joke the other day,” and they’ll share it and the other person will be like, “No way. Rob said the same thing to me weeks ago. Jesus, that guy really needs to come up with some original material.”

If things ever get out of hand, like say I tell two different people the same joke, two times each, obviously everybody will think me a one-trick horse, like I’m just starved for material, totally full of myself, overestimating my joke and storytelling abilities. In this case, to kind of turn things around, I’ll start really upping the joke, telling it even more times, at a much greater frequency and intensity. I’ll do it to the point where I’ll totally know that other people have heard it. And I’ll start telling it in a way as to catch the people off guard, like I’ll be really serious about something, and I’ll lure them in with my sense of sincerity, only to reveal that I’m going about the same old joke, the same old same old. At which case I’ll start fake laughing, over and over again, like I’m crazy.

What I’ve done here, see, it’s not about the joke anymore. I’ve taken an overused joke and wrapped it up into one big joke, the joke being the multiple repetitions of the same joke. Get it? Isn’t that funny? Are you laughing? You’re totally laughing. I get it. I don’t mess around here. What was I talking about? Something about repetition. Something about worrying about writing about the same stuff over and over again. But, whatever, this was somewhat original, writing about worrying about repeating myself. I could probably write about this a few more times also, like a month from now, and then three months from now, and then I could wrap all of those up. Yeah, it’s funny, come on, maybe not funny, but it’s something. And if you’re reading this sentence, you read it, right? The whole thing? I can’t imagine anybody coming to this page and only reading the last sentence.

*Microsoft Word, in sentences like this, always tells me to write whom, and while it’s probably grammatically correct, I’ve never heard anybody say “whom” in real life**, nobody I’d ever want to hang out with anyway.

**Except for the Metallica classic, “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” of course.

Internet overload

I think it’s been about a month since I’ve written something about not being able to think of anything to write about. I set myself a totally arbitrary once a month limit, because stuff like this, it’s kind of boring, it’s totally unimaginative. But I think it’s necessary sometimes. In trying to write everyday, I feel myself going through cycles, patterns. I’ll have a couple of weeks where I’m feeling really strong about my writing, where I sit down and these blog posts and whatever else I’m writing just kind of write themselves. And then there’s the flipside of that coin, where each day is much more of a struggle, where I think that I’m just out of ideas, with nothing to write about. And it’s not a switch, it’s not like I’m on and then I’m off. There are all of the different in-betweens.

So then I’ll just get to the point where I’m like, all right, I might as well at least get some content out there, even if the only thing that I can say is that I have nothing to say. And I know everybody has to deal with this to some extent, but it still deserves mentioning. It’s really, really hard to get work done thanks to the Internet. It’s unbelievably difficult for me to try to focus on only Microsoft Word for however long it takes to write a whole piece without desperately wanting to click on my Internet browser every ten minutes or so. I guess I can’t just blame the Internet; there have always been distractions. TV, video games. I could always just take a nap.

But the Internet is unavoidable. It’s ever present. And it’s new. This is totally uncharted territory for our species. What are going to be some of the long term effects of how we deal with such constant access to unlimited quantities of always up to date information? I don’t want to just talk like my experiences are how it’s like for everybody else, but I do have experiences, and I know that I’m not totally alone in dealing with them.

It’s not just writing either. Take office work. After I graduated, I worked two office jobs for about eight months each. I literally didn’t do any work. And I’m not even trying to exaggerate. At both jobs I spent at least ninety percent of my time sitting at a desk surfing the Internet. If the phone rang, I answered it. Maybe I’d have like twenty minutes of data entry to complete on some spreadsheet. I was constantly haunted by thoughts like, man, somebody’s going to fire me. Somebody’s going to come up to me one day and say, Rob, what do you actually do here? What do you provide to the company? Why are we paying you?

But nobody ever did. And so I’d go to work and look at web sites. And then I’d go home and watch TV. And it took me forever to even identify what I was feeling going through that existence. And people have to be better at it I am. They have to be out there. Otherwise we wouldn’t have a functioning economy. But I couldn’t do it. It’s hard enough trying to write, something that I really like doing, without getting sucked into the Internet. It’s almost impossible for me not to give into temptation if my alternative is something that I despise.

The thing about the Internet is that you can’t escape. It’s like, if I have a party sized bag of Twix in my house, I’m going to gradually eat every single candy bar over the course of the day, well past the point to where I’m not enjoying them anymore, but I can’t stop, because something inside has taken over, something that craves sugar, calories, whatever. But it’s easy enough to fix that. I don’t buy giant bags of Twix. The bag is gone and the temptation is gone. I won’t sit around thinking about all of the Twix that I could be eating if only I got up, put my coat on, and walked to the store.

The Internet is in my pocket. I have a faster Internet connection on my cell phone than I did on my actual computer when I was in high school. And that’s only really a backup Internet. I’d only have to rely on cell phone Internet if my house Internet went out. But I’ve been living in this house for a year and it’s only been out once, for like an hour.

So back to writing. I’m writing every day. I’m setting up quotas for myself, how much work I want to get done. These are all goals that I aspire to. Sometimes I fall short. I just can’t shake the feeling that I should be getting more done, that I should have more to write about, but a big part of my consciousness is constantly wanting to be on the Internet. I’m always tempted. My phone beeps every time I get an email. I’m writing on my computer but I can see the browser icon at the bottom of the screen, just begging to be opened up. And if I give in to temptation, hours just vanish. And then the day is over.

This is all way too dramatic. I’m no Luddite. But I just feel like, since this is such a new phenomenon, there’s no way to really assess how I’m doing. I just always worry, is it holding me back? Whenever I can’t think of anything to write about, is it because I’m just constantly distracted, in a way that twenty years ago I wouldn’t have been? If I worked at an office before computers, worked eight hours a day somewhere without any access to distraction, would I have done a good job? Learned a business? Taken pride in what I do for a living? Or would I have been the same exact way, unable to sit still all day, finding something else to pass the hours, taking breaks every hour to head over to the drug store, to buy that giant bag of Twix, the big one, the party sized bag full of little chocolate covered caramel cookies?

Procrastination

I’ve been taking these writing classes for the past year. They’re usually like eight weeks long, once a week type of deals. They’re great. They keep me writing. They force me to go beyond my habits, the way that I go about writing almost unconsciously. I’m starting my third series of classes tomorrow morning, and, although I had told myself that this time would be different, it’s not different at all. It’s ten thirty at night as I’m writing this, and as of right now, I still haven’t even started the homework that’s due tomorrow morning.

I always do this. I’ve always done this my whole life. It doesn’t matter if I have a day or a whole semester to complete an assignment; every single time I’ll put it off to the last second humanly possible, and then I’ll sit around for another ten minutes or so before I really get to work. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s not a good feeling, that growing ball of anxiety in my stomach, the knowledge that I’d be saving myself a lot of grief if I just got something started, anything really, so that when it’s all said and done I could look back and think, well, at least I tried.

In high school I would stay up the whole night before a test and not start studying until like five in the morning. That’s crazy. I knew it was crazy. But I could never get myself to actually crack open a book unless I felt that sudden panic, the kind of a physical response that you only get when you look at your watch, look at all of the work that you have to get done, and you say to yourself, “Holy shit, there is no way I’m going to be able to write a ten page paper in half an hour,” and then all of the sudden I’d be working like crazy.

Why couldn’t I do that same level of work, but earlier? Why couldn’t I spread it out? Give myself a chance to do maybe a second draft, a reread at least. So when I got to college I thought, you know what, I’ll just go to the library. I’ll just sit in the library, free from distraction, away from my friends watching movies and having fun. I won’t leave until I’m done with my work. But the library had a vending machine. The library had Internet. Sometimes I would just go wandering the stacks and looking through random books that had absolutely nothing to do with the task at hand. So all I would wind up doing was wasting time, but in the library instead of in my dorm room.

It’s like there is some part of me that would rather do anything, literally any other thing than what I’m supposed to be doing. I must be a glutton for pain. Because, and I already said this, but knowing that something is due in like an hour is the worst feeling in the world. Sometimes I wish that I would have just not handed anything in, got an F, and then called it a day. But I’m always somehow able buy myself more time, prolong the agony. I’d go to a professor’s office hours and ask for more time. They always said yes. So I’d be stuck an extra day in the library, again wandering the halls, wasting time trying to get into normally locked doors, seeing if they had anything cool hidden away.

I took this to such an extreme that, after four pretty successful years of somehow managing to stuff a whole bachelor’s in liberal arts worth of work into maybe ten cumulative hours of last minute fury, I decided that, for my very last paper due at college, some ten page final grade essay for some elective philosophy class that had nothing to do with my major, I’d just not do it at all and see how far I could push back the deadline. It was pretty far. I got the dean and professor to allow me to hand it in like mid July, about a month and a half after graduation. I actually had to go to the dean’s office and exchange him this paper for my diploma.

That’s totally, beyond crazy, really. I was like, well, this is my last paper, after this I’ll be free of this night-before-an-assignment-is-due anxiety. And so it didn’t seem important. It didn’t seem real. My brain thought, well, if you actually put your graduation in jeopardy, I mean, that would take the pressure and the anxiety to a whole new level. So I spent my last month at college picking up extra hours at my part-time job, playing intramural softball, making stupid t-shirts for campus clubs … anything and everything except doing this paper that I wound up typing up like half an hour before the dean’s final, I mean it this time, you have to hand it to me in half an hour deadline.

I know that a big part of the problem is with me, there’s just something inside that can’t stick to the task at hand. But I know that another big part of it is the Internet. When I was in the Peace Corps I had no Internet for a solid two years. It was awesome. I started writing, like not just once in a while writing, but writing everyday. It’s the only reason why I’m doing this stuff now, because I know that I can. And I figured out that I could only because I had absolutely nothing else to do with my spare time.

But I’ve been back in America for like a year and a half now and the same old problems are back. I’m sticking to this goal of getting a blog post up every single day, just to give myself a deadline, just to really make it count. Because otherwise I wouldn’t do it at all. But everyday, to get something done, sometimes it takes forever. I’ll just waste so much time not writing when I could easily be writing.

And it’s all even crazier because the only reason I’m writing a blog post right now, at close to eleven at night, is because I have actual homework, writing homework, that I should be doing for tomorrow morning’s class. I haven’t even started it yet. What is wrong with me? Why couldn’t I just have at least started thinking about what I would write for class like a week ago? I signed up for it two weeks ago, and the registration page posted the assignment that was due for tomorrow. I didn’t even look at it. This is ridiculous. Instead of writing my assignment, I spent the same amount of time and energy writing something else, this. This is just insane.

Seven hundred and eighty six

Sometimes you just have to sit down at the computer and type. That’s what I do when I can’t think of anything to write about. I think about sixty percent of my blog posts start the same exact way every time. Something about how I don’t know what to write about, and then it usually leads to something else, and then eventually I wind up with a big chunk of text that I can put up on the Internet. I should probably just wait until the whole blog post is finished, and then come back and erase the first paragraph. It really doesn’t add to anything, right? But then I feel like I’ll be losing something, something that’s unique about my writing. And I’m also superstitious, like if I start deleting the, “I don’t know what to write about,” words, then they’ll lose their magic, and as I continue to write in the future, they won’t work at all, and I really won’t have anything to write about.

Everybody’s heard of that John Cage song where it’s just silence for four and a half minutes, right? I wish that I could do something like that. Like I’ll write a book but it’ll just be blank pages. And everyone will applaud me and ridicule me at the same time, which is fine, I’ll take the ridicule, as long as I’m famous, as long as they talk about me in high schools in the future.

But most people will only look at the first twenty or so pages of my blank book and they’ll dismiss it, think it’s just a novelty, a fad. But my real fans will actually read the book, they’ll look at each blank page and they’ll lick their fingers and turn the pages and really try to understand what I was trying to say by putting out such an unorthodox piece. And then they’ll get to page fifty. There won’t be any page numbers either, so they’ll have to be keeping count. But that shouldn’t really be a problem because there won’t be any text to distract them.

And they’ll turn the page and it’ll say “Page Fifty. Congratulations.” Because there actually will be text, and there will be a whole book written inside. But I won’t want just anybody reading my masterpiece. I won’t want my work to be cheapened by mass consumption. And so that’s what I’ll be after by starting the book halfway through. I’ll pretend to write a book with no words but … yeah, you get it right?

But then what if word spreads about my book, that it really starts on page fifty? People would buy the book and then flip right to where the writing starts, bypassing my trick, skipping past all of those blank pages. And it would have the opposite effect, because people hate being tricked or told what to do. And so by me making it harder for people to read, they’ll naturally gravitate to it more, in defiance of my plan.

But that won’t happen either, because at the end of my book I’ll tell readers not to tell anybody else about what they’ve read, to keep it a secret, something between the reader and me. But what if they tell people before they get to that part? Well I’ll just have to make sure that whatever I wind up writing is so compelling that the reader is unable to put the book down, that the whole thing will get read in one sitting. But what if the book is lying out on a coffee table and some guy starts absentmindedly flipping through all of the pages, accidentally coming across my text? Well then I’ll just have to push the start of the book back even further, one hundred pages of blank text, five thousand pages. You’ll really have to get through it.

I’ve never listened to that John Cage song. I don’t even know the real title. I just know that the title is how long the blank track is. I don’t think anybody’s ever listened to it. It’s too boring. Why would you go through all of the motions of pressing play when there’s nothing that’ll ever come out of the other end? I bet you Cage tricked everybody just like I would have. I bet you after a minute or two of empty noise he starts up with a song or a speech. He has to. He’s like, “Hey everybody. This is D-D-D-D-D-DJ Johnny C. coming at ya with a secret track. But don’t go telling anybody, you hear?”

I just tried to listen to the whole thing on Youtube, but I only made it through fifteen seconds. It’s really boring.

I’m worried

I’m worried that I’ve run out of ideas. I’m worried that I wrote everything that I have to write about. Like when I started writing, I thought to myself, just keep writing, just keep doing it everyday and you’ll get better. But I’m worried that the opposite has happened, like maybe I only had a very finite quantity of interesting things to say, and now that I’ve written all of them, I’m condemned to, if I want to keep this up, just writing a bunch of nonsense over and over again, until the nonsense becomes so repetitive that every single thing that I write looks identical to every single thing that I wrote the day before. And it’ll get so bad that they won’t just feel or look identical, but they will be identical, like I’ll have written this same piece two or three or four days in a row. And then it’ll get to the point where it’s even worse, where not only is every page the same, but every paragraph is the same. And then the sentences, and finally, it’ll get so bad that I’m only writing one word, on repeat, not even one word, just one letter, just typing out the same letter over and over again. I’ll be like, all right, time to get to work. And I’ll sit down and just start writing, “SSSSSSSSSSSS” and I’ll really want to think of a different letter to type, or even just maybe to make it lowercase, but I’ll be so bankrupt for ideas, I just won’t be able to get past it.

I’m worried that the yogurt I ate of the fridge might not have been as fresh as I thought it was. It said that the expiration date was two days ago, but I don’t buy that, for several reasons. First of all, the whole container is sealed, and the actual expiration date isn’t for a month from now. But then on the side of the packaging it tells me to consume the whole thing within three days as soon as I break the seal. And that’s what I’m talking about when I say that it was expired. Like it wasn’t actually expired. The date hadn’t passed. But I opened it up a week ago. Maybe ten days. But I really wanted a snack, and so I cracked open the container and, yeah, it had definitely been a while because all of this liquid had accumulated at the top. So what do I do, do I drain the liquid or do I mix it back in the yogurt? Part of me thinks that, well, the liquid was there a week ago, but it was still part of the yogurt. So if I drain it and then eat the yogurt, it will be missing something, that liquid. But then another part of me thinks that, isn’t yogurt alive? Like aren’t there active cultures (whatever that means) floating around in it? What if this liquid is just a natural byproduct of a container of living yogurt living in the fridge for ten days, two weeks, tops? Isn’t that gross then? Is that like yogurt pee? I’m worried that it might be yogurt pee. But that’s crazy, because yogurt doesn’t really pee, and it’s gross to keep mentioning it. Finally, I gave it a whiff. Did it smell OK? I’m worried that it smelled fine. And what I mean by this is, even if it’s a fresh yogurt, won’t it always smell a little off? If someone told you that you smell like yogurt, even fresh yogurt, wouldn’t you be a little insulted, feel like you might need to take a shower? So I ate it. But I’m worried that it wasn’t fresh. And not for any of the above mentioned reasons. I’m just feeling really sick now. And now everything smells like yogurt, and it’s just making this whole feeling that much worse.

I’m worried that I might not ever make it to the Olympics. Obviously my chance to compete at a physical level is lost. I’m not an idiot. And I’m not saying that I’m old. I’m just too old to be an Olympic basketball player, or an Olympic swimmer. But what about an Olympic gun shooter? You don’t have to be young or in shape to shoot a gun, right? That’s what I always thought would wind up happening. Well, not always. I always thought I would get there as a real athlete, like a long jumper or a boxer, but that was when I was in grammar school, high school. As I started getting older and realizing that I wasn’t really advancing in any of these areas of athletics, I just changed my goals a little bit, shifted to the shooting. But now the same doubts are coming back, and I’m getting worried again, not just about the shooting, but about making it to the Olympics in general because, and like I said, I’ve already put all of my eggs in the shooting basket. Like I’ve said to myself, I’ll still get there, but I haven’t even started training with guns. I’ve never even shot a gun before. I’m worried that everyday that goes by where I’m not target practicing, the odds of me representing the USA on a shooting team are growing more and more unlikely. I mean, maybe, maybe there’s a really small chance that I could be a gun shooting prodigy, like that could be my hidden talent, like theoretically I could be the Mozart or Einstein or Lebron of shooting, and so then I wouldn’t have to train at all, it would just be a matter of finding a gun and getting in touch with whoever’s coaching the shooting team. But let’s be honest, I’m a realistic guy, that’s probably not the case at all. It could be, sure anything’s possible, but I mean really, now that I’m thinking about it, I was never really good at Duck Hunt, and you’d think if I had some inherent targeting skills locked away inside, they’d at least show up with a shooting video game. Yeah, one time I played Big Buck Hunter at a bar and I was terrible.

I’m worried that my only chance at Olympic gold is to get rich enough to buy an Olympic horse. But still, I’d get so jealous of that horse out there on the field, competing at an Olympic level, and I’d just be sitting on the sidelines, and I might get crazy for a second, and in an impulse I might gallop onto the field myself, screw them, I’ll think to myself, I can beat any one of these horses. But everyone knows how easily horses get spooked, right? I’ll get kicked so hard. And they’ll keep kicking me, over and over again. Maybe right in the jaw. Maybe my jaw will get kicked clean off. What’s my life going to be like then? I’m worried I’ll get depressed, despondent, suicidal. But wait a second. If I’m that rich, rich enough to buy a whole Olympic horse team, won’t I have the money for a new jaw? A better jaw? I’ll have the best prosthetic jaw available, even better than a real jaw. It’ll be able to chomp through boulders. It’ll be able to unhinge, like a snake’s. A six million dollar jaw, but even more expensive, like a twelve million dollar jaw. With gold teeth. I mean diamond teeth.

I’m worried that I’ve wasted everyone’s time here. I’m worried that whoever reads to the end of this blog piece is thinking to themselves, “That’s it. That’s the last time I read this crap. From now on, I’m only reading serious stuff. Rob’s ruined all non-serious reading for me, for life, forever.” And that’ll be a shame, because there’s a lot of non-serious writing that’s out there that’s totally worth reading, and I don’t want to have ruined that for anybody.