Patient readers know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that in these blog entries, I rarely end up at my original intended destination.

Take yesterday’s blog entry. Please!

Clearly, I started off talking about the world outside my well lit playground of a mind and then suddenly switched to this whole elaborate thought experiment where I wonder what my life would have been like if I had not been raped at the age of 4.

I assume you wonderful people who read this thing are used to that by now.

But I would not blame someone for finding it frustrating, especially if they were interested in the first idea and want to see where I was going with it.

If so, I am truly sorry. But it’s unlikely to change any time soon.

I do how I do because it’s all I can do.

I have, however, figured out why and how it happens,and that’s progress of a sort.

Deploy the elaborate metaphor!

It’s as though all the thoughts and feelings I need to express are in a huge stack, and the stack, unsurprisingly,. is not that well organized.

Related ideas are sometimes found stacked together, but sometimes as I take thoughts anjd ideas off the stack and express them, the next thing in the stack is something completely unrelated and I have to express that before I can do anything else.

It’s all very linear, isn’t it? Maybe people waiting in line would be a better metaphor.

Oh well, whatever and ever, amen.

I can fight this effect to a certain event. I can stick the unrelated thought on a shelf and try to get back to my original point. It can be done.

But it’s very hard on me, both mentally and emotionally. That unrelated thing from the stack really wants to get expressed. In fact, it has probably waited in the stack (line?) for a very long time and now that it’s finally made it, it does not want to wait another second for its final apotheosis.

Damn I love that word.

It is far more natural, normal, and easy for me to simply express this new notion and take it as far as it goes while abandoning the previous one.

Like all creative types, I follow the connections between things. But due to the nature of the stack, sometimes those connections are, shall we say, highly idiosyncratic to myself.

In other words, they only make sense to me. If you’re lucky.

Sometimes even I don’t know how I got from Topic A to Topic B. All I can do is trust that in my mind at least, there’s a connection.

Even if the only real connection is that they were together in my stack.

Part of it is simply the nature of this blog. Its main purpose is to provide me an outlet for all those thoughts, emotions, and ideas that are piled up in my head waiting to be expressed. The more of them I can express, the better I feel, because I have finally freed up the mental bandwidth that thought etc was taking up in my mind and that leaves more bandwidth free for use in important tasks.

Like, for instance, mood stabilization.

I suppose that’s what makes me a writer. All those things waiting in line to be expressed. Presumably, in a sane non-writer’s mind, those things simply don’t get generated, or if they do, they just get deleted afterwards.

Not so with me. I hold on to each and every single one of them. They all go on the stack. And that stack is very, very tall.

Dammit, I should have gone with people waiting in line. A very long line of people waiting for something is way easier to visualize than a stack a mile high.

Oh well, too late now.

And it’s not all bad. That stack of notions is mighty handy to have because it means I always have a ton of creative ideas at hand.

I am never at a loss for something that needs expressing.

And I think the sheer pressure of the stack – its weight, in a sense – provides the energy that fuels my boundless creativity.

Like it’s some kind of deep geothermal process happening deep underground and I am the lucky fellow who gets to tap into it.

In theory, at least. It can be hard to harness for useful purposes.

Volcanism is a harsh mistress. The fires of creation run very, very hot and glow very, very bright, and it takes a special kind of person to be able to survive the light and heat long enough to use them to create something new.

It helps to be a little bit dead inside. Hence the well known relationship between creativity and mental illness.

Like I keep saying, there has to be something wrong with you if you want to be a writer.

Normal people can express themselves in other ways.

But we writer types can only do it with words. And putting things into words is not easy. If other avenues of expression were open to us, we’d use those.

But for whatever reason, the normal avenues of expression are closed off to us and so we have to put it into words, and that requires learning to write.

And writing is a strange and difficult activity. If there wasn’t an urgent need pressuring us to do it, we would not bother.

That’s one of the reasons the one thing I tell people about writing is that writers write. If you want to be a writer, write things. That’s the one and only qualification, but it can’t be waived, skipped over, or bypassed.

It sounds almost insultingly obvious, but you would be surprised at how many miss this because they like the idea of being a writer but not the work.

So they content themselves with planning to write, thinking about what they would like to write some day, talk endlessly about their brilliant ideas, and never get around to actually writing anything.

I feel like wanting to get the feeling of things without putting in the work is a phenomenon that runs through modern society down to its very roots, but that is a topic for another time.

Now what was it I planned on talking about?

Oh right, why I wander off topic so much.

Looks like it happened again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.