Treading Water and Ding Dongs

I am always uncomfortable with those books that writers write about writing. Annie Dillard's A Writer's Life, Anne Lamot's Bird by Bird, Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones. I read them years ago, and they each left me feeling like the guy who reads about weightlifting while eating a package of Ding Dongs or those people who take photos in museums and videos of aquariums. Writing this blog requires a good dose of humility. I think the assignment was to write about writing or to offer some insight into this luxurious form of on-the-job training. Part of my deal with the devil to lead a writer's life, it is his way of keeping me fit by making me tred water even though I'm exhausted from all the laps in the literary pool. But blogs need purpose, a niche, and here the Lady just wanders and thinks about things often unrelated to writing. I've always kept journals not because, like most people I want to record the moments that add up to a life that one day will unveil its meaning. I write them because I have a lousy memory and a very hard time processing my thoughts for speech. It now goes by the label Attention Deficit Disorder, which makes people like me and Malcolm and so many others for whom I now have great emphathy hate talking on the phone and cocktail parties and stay out of jobs like teaching, sales, and motivational speaking. All I knew when I started writing journals, and still know to this day, is that I have to wrestle every moment with my concentration, to filter through distractions while aligning my thoughts into a sequence that produces a coherent idea that never comes out right anyway when I say it. The process of thinking just takes too damn long. But with writing, I can take all the time I need to process the thought (and as an English major, it helped to have long stretches of time to reread or rewrite the line, the paragraph, the page.) It occurs to me that the Lady needs to stop wandering and find a niche. Except for the obvious and cheeky, I'm open to suggestions.

There. I forced myself to write about writing today and now I have a craving for chocolate.