the rix mix

My blog's 5th birthday was on April 18th. Either Blogger didn't have post titles back then or I was refusing to use them. Blogger software was so ureliable I lost nearly the entire month of June '03. My blog had a different name.

I created the blog for the same reason as Tata; to keep from going crazy. I went crazy that year anyway, slowly, by increments I could feel & see, despite (or partly because of) the moderate daily dose of Zoloft I was taking at the time. The therapist I visited every other week was powerless to prevent it. I was occasionally hanging out & sleeping with a woman who listened to wingnut radio all day while she worked, a sure sign I was falling off the edge. I had a perverse fascination with the apathy she showed toward our relationship. It was the season of "Mission Accomplished." You couldn't dent the Executive Hubris with a sledge hammer. The president was more unhinged than I was.

I think about "upgrading" the blog & placing a banner graphic at the top. But I know it wouldn't increase the traffic. The blog template has so many small adjustments & tweeks that the entire structure could collapse. Why risk it when there's an empire of unprofessional webpages I have to maintain?

Yesterday, it occurred to me during a chat with a friend that I write better blog posts (in my judgment) while I'm reading better books. I tend to channel freshly implanted ideas & writing styles, which get run through the compound sentences I think of as "luncheonette counter talk" or "phone call paragraphs" or the more cryptic "radio segueways"- these categories are flexible. I challenge readers to find anything that reads like I've been drinking; "bar blab" has never been my thing. It's the responsibility of the editor to fix my writing, & I don't have one.

One reason I probably don't write much poetry is because prose disrupts my sense of poetic rhythm, which is very close to prose only slower. Syllables. I usually have to think about writing a poem exclusively for a least a a couple of days - go into training - before a poem discovers the synapses, & at that point I used to be able to write half-a-dozen keepers following the first attempt. This was one function of my old hard copy journals tapped out on a small Smith-Corona portable electric & then a Smith-Corona Data Disk word processor (I was loyal to the product, no Brother, IBM, or Royal on my desk). Those journals moved in & out of poetry. I even wrote poems in the middle of letters. Once the poems began coming, I could write them down on anything, anywhere. Sometimes it was like taking dictation.

Although I try to think of my blog as a journal or extended poem, I know it is neither. It lacks the emotionally naked obsessions of the former - a very private world, & the
let's take a little stroll
around the mental block
qualities of the latter.

Labels: about writing, love, mental health