An ode to a blog

I am very fond of this blog. As I have come to learn, there is a certain joy in creation, and there is a certain sense of creation in writing, which I had not discovered until I started this blog. What started as a pandemic project has now blossomed into a personal project that I hope to continue in the years to come, at which time I hope the pandemic will be long over and I will have many adventures to document. I have often said jokingly (but only half-jokingly) to friends that maybe in another completely unrealistic past life, it would have been nice to be a vagabond writer living in a small Parisian flat, sipping coffee in tiny cups and carrying fresh baguettes under one arm and dusty old books in the other. Sure, a part of that mental image would unfortunately involve me being a struggling, starving artist, because naturally, all good writers (at least the ones I've made up in my mind) must suffer for their craft. But despite this shortcoming I think it's still a nice idea to entertain, the idea that somewhere out there, people spend their lives writing because nothing else comes close to being better.

And yet, my best writing comes when I write as if I am not a writer, which I arguably am not, and which I never have been. I have no readers to cater to, no critics to impress. There is minimal need for backspace key. I can write in the self-indulgent way that Neruda did when he penned the words

Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write, for example, “The night is starry and the blue stars shiver in the distance.”

Or I can play at alliteration acrobatics, as Nabokov did when he wrote the brilliant first lines to a novel I could not will myself to finish:

"My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth."

Or of course, I can also just be an absolute shit writer and not be able to come up with any of this genius, and I would still enjoy myself immensely for the pure joy of hearing my keyboard make their clickety clack sound as they are now, making me want to continue typing and thus use long words like ostentatious and idiosyncratic, whose meaning I only pretend to know.

But what I mean to say is that, tonight, I will not be writing the saddest lines, or take a tumble towards a teeter totter of dissonant consonants. Tonight I am writing because I feel quite nothing at all, and have been for quite some time. And that is a feeling in itself. Put simply, I am perfectly satisfied. (Every time I say this, I am reminded of my best friend Sarah who made fun of me in Grade 10 and repeatedly years later, for going to our science teacher with a test that I was not happy with, getting two bonus marks and then announcing to him "I am satisfied", clearly still not pleased) ((Also I have come realize that Sarah is the only best friend I mention in this blog (the only best friend that matters, she may point out (Hi Sarah)) and yet I still continue to introduce her each time as if she was a new character)) Blah! That was too many brackets within brackets (aka. bracket inception), but may I redirect you to the first rule of blogging that we just discussed, that's right, no rules.

I really do mean it when I say that I have absolutely no clue what I am headed with this blog entry. I think that what I intended to do was to discover the fun in writing again, because lately I felt like I could only write when I was struck with major inspiration or over-cliched emotion or a sense of struggle, where there was none to be found. I am satisfied, as we've already established, and yet, I wrote with urgency, trying to chase after words that needed to be pinned down, because I thought that only then did have writing have meaning or deserve to be read. Even in my last entry, I wrote about trying to frantically pen down a feeling that was quickly eluding me, when really, it was already gone. I mean this is not my first time reaching this kind of impasse, last time, it took a blog post where I ranted about a single word: "Turpentine" to snap me out of it. I realized then as I realized now that I enjoy writing too much to be limited by what I feel deserves to be written about or what would sound nice to read, instead of what I feel like writing in that very moment. I am not a struggling writer in a Parisian flat, and I am surely not a Nabokov or Neruda. I am not a writer. I can write selfishly and force no one to listen. And the thought of this is immensely liberating, to write for oneself and oneself only.