Michelle

Word diet

Hello,
Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me…
Is there anyone at home?
–Pink Floyd/Comfortably Numb

The other day on Twitter, I was threatening to go on a word diet. Joking, mostly–not threatening. Threatening would imply some actual intent to follow through. I could probably follow through in some ways, I guess.

It would be silly though. It’s a totally empty threat.

For one thing, no one would care if I curtailed my reading, writing and speaking. This is a big demotivator. My wrists and hands would thank me– writing and reading while holding an iPad on my lap, curled up on the couch is not an ergonomically friendly way to do either. No one cares outside my physical body. Write, talk? Dont? Meh. It just doesn’t matter.

Oh, right reading. Well, I would care if I cut down on my reading. I would care a lot.

Curtailing my speech? Well. I don’t think I could really cut down on that much more. It don’t talk much as it is. I’m catching a cold, maybe I’ll get laryngitis again. That led to a whole week of silence last time.

It was sort of peaceful, not talking….

Maybe it would be more peaceful if I cut back on all of my words. Especially the ones on the running commentary in my brain. I work on it. It’s…better. Still. Tiresome. Cutting back on the words in my brain requires constant focus and presence. Annoying things like being present in the moment. It’s kind of a challenge. I like to be in the ether a lot. Still, I do try. Every day.

Work in progress. Maybe I need a construction sign.

And an analyst.

My brain is still spinning around on “the Goldfinch” more than it really needs to. I told it to shut up, but it doesn’t appear to be listening to me. At least it shuts down at night. I’ve been having peculiar dreams though. Maybe more peculiar than usual, though that’s a pretty high bar. Did I tell you about the dream about the guy at the airport flaying little kids? No?

That’s an oldie. Not a goodie. It revisits from time to time and it’s terrifying. Without going into detail, in the dream I am ethically complicit in little kids being skinned alive while they’re being raped.

Being raped, while being skinned alive as entertainment.

Yeah.

It’s not a good dream.

It comes back every so often, just when I think I’ve gotten rid of it for good. It’s terrifying every time. It feels real, and that is not a real you want to feel.

What was that about an analyst?

Here’s the question, though: why is it that I’m even entertaining the idea of cutting back on words? Was it thinking about cutting back on words that brought the dream back? Or was that coincidental? And which words do I think are the most problematic, word in or words out? And why?

Y’all are going to answer that for me, right?

No, no one ever talks back to the blog. Sad thing.

Is there anybody out there?

If so, please let me know how ironic it is that I’m writing a bunch of words about cutting back on the number of words I use.

I’ll be over here in my corner, backing my head against my desk. Lightly, but firmly.

Happy birthday to all those having birthdays

Who do you love? What do you love? Why am I so full of questions? Are there answers?

Only what is that thing? Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet–for me, anyway–all that’s worth living for lies in that charm?

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.
–Donna Tartt/the Goldfinch

Sometimes, a book stirs up all sorts of things. This one did. All the big questions, swirling around in my head like the world’s worst Word Drunk Bender. I’m not going to even try to rein it in. I’m just going to throw it all up in the air. Let Donna Tartt control it, she’s the one with the Pulitzer for using words.

The million dollar question. The question that keeps us up at night. The question that breaks our hearts. The question that breaks the heart of people who love us when we don’t love them back. The one that keeps us in jobs we don’t like. The one that keeps couples together or tears them apart.

What’s the thing every self help book says, the thing that I find so entirely full of shit? “Follow your heart.” Or “follow your passion.”

What’s that other cliché? The one that is so true?
“The heart wants what it wants.”

Can we make ourselves want what is good for us? Bring ourselves to a point where we naturally stop loving what is bad for us and genuinely want the good?

And who gets to decide that whole “good” thing, anyway? And how do you even know what’s good? Is there even such a thing as good? Are our very ideas of good and bad part of what limits us and makes us unhappy, or at least less happy than we could be?

Is being happy even the main thing?

The peculiar heartbreak of people who know they could never really live with someone too broken, too untrustworthy, too drug or alcohol loving, not enough whatever, but can’t make the love go away.

You can’t turn it off. I can’t anyway. Maybe some people can. Should you even try?

You can stay away from someone who hurts you. Can you stop loving someone once you’ve started? Or can you only distance yourself.

Do all these questions apply to things you love as well as people?

All I have about this are questions and it’s too important to answer them incorrectly. Yes, I am a little fixated on it lately. Not lately, always. But reading something that got stuck in my brain has made it worse. Temporarily, I hope.

Blame it on a more severe book hangover than usual from “the Goldfinch” and the contrast between Theo trying and always failing to be a good guy, and Boris who flings himself into the world like a Tasmanian devil and devours life whole. Who will probably die young, all used up.

I suspect Van Gogh was doing what he loved. Consumed by it, maybe even maddened by it. Could he ever paint what he really saw? Was he already mad before the paint took over his life or did the paint drive him insane? Or did the paint keep him alive longer than he might have been otherwise? Did the paint give him a little bit of peace?

Then when you lose it..like Fitzgerald and Hemingway lost the writing. What’s left? They lose the writing, the holy rage, then they lose the people it attracted…then…what’s left for them? They don’t know how to live without it.

Can we escape who we are?

Should we try to, or should we learn to accept who we are?

Do questions ever have answers or only more questions?