Unleashing What’s Inside: Blogging

This post is a writing exercise where I simply type whatever I think of. There’s no editing here except for spelling, because I do want this to at least be semi-legible. If I blank I have to keep typing the same word over and over again until I think of something else to say. The first word I type is my prompt, and I go from there. Reading this might be a little jarring, so prepare yourself for something raw and disorganized.

Blogging. Sucks. Right now, anyway. I’m honestly sick of making excuses and of feeling beholden to the idea of creating a constant stream of content for other people to enjoy. I want to exist in this world and I want to extend my abilities as a writer but I constantly feel like what comes out isn’t good enough, like I keep messing this thing up. And the ridiculous thing is that there is NO PRESSURE. Like, nobody really cares if I don’t post every day in October and the only person it really hurts is me because it damages my viewership and my credibility. But why the hell do I even care about that stuff? It doesn’t MATTER. This isn’t my job, it’s my hobby, and doing it should make me happy and if it isn’t making me happy then at any time I feel like I should just be able to stop.

Stop making excuses, stop worrying about what other people think or what’s gonna happen with this blog in five years. years years years years where I could just focus on having fun and just type whatever is inside instead of this constant worrying about random crap that isn’t actually gonna matter when it gets right down to it.

I have plans, you know. I’m already getting stuff ready for next year and for where I want the blog to go next, and I have all of these ideas in my head but they STAY in my head and never come out onto the page. You know I have like five novels kicking around in there? Two fanfics, three originals, one I want to do for NaNoWriMo and I wanted to write it last year but November is a HORRIBLE month for me when it comes to writing because my birthday is on the first and I usually get a game or something that makes me lose focus on writing and instead I’m focused on enjoying the game instead. But hey, at least a new game this year would actually give me something to write about on this blog o’mine.

Mine mine mine I sound like those birds on Finding Nemo that say “MINE!” all the freaking time and my little brother used to sound like that, always chirping “MINE!” when he was a little kid. He’s older now, and more mature than he used to be, and it’s weird watching your siblings grow up but it’s even weirder watching your KID grow up, because my son just came home after staying with my family for a week and he seems so much taller now than he was then.

I wonder if he’ll like video games, and if he and I might play together someday. Knowing my luck he’ll like MMOs and Call of Duty and FIFA and play pretty much every game that I would never lay a hand on. But that’s okay if he does, and maybe I’ll get lucky and he’ll love Zelda and Mario and all the things that I do and he and I will be able to play together, and his mom too. too too toot too I just accidentally typed “toot” but I’m gonna leave it because that’s what gave me something to go forward on.

You ever hear that tongue-twister? A tooter who tooted the flute tried to tutor two tooters to toot. Said the two to the tutor “is it easier to toot or to tutor two tooters to toot?” And can we talk about how hard it was to type that just now because yeesh, tongue-twisters are finger twisters too people. People people people people now all I can think about it the word people over and over again and I feel like a character in a movie just yelling “PEOPLE, PEOPLE, people, people, people,” over and over again and getting quieter until everyone is paying attention to him and then he says something profound.

So a bit off-topic here but I think I want to end these things by coming full-circle back to the prompt that started in. In college I was the director of this improv club for a couple of years and one year I taught the group this improv technique called a “harold.” It’s really cool stuff, learned about it from my mentor and read Del Close’s  book on the subject, and basically a harold is a long-form improv that takes one idea and plays with it until you can’t explore it any more. You start with the idea and then do word associations and then do scenes based on the words in the word associations and eventually you’ve explored this idea so thoroughly that there’s nothing left to say and in a way you’ve come full circle. The circular nature of Harolds is key to their success because they work best when you tie all the different themes together in some way and you bring jokes back from earlier scenes and that’s what makes it funny but it’s also meaningful because you just tore this word to absolute pieces to discover every tiny thing it could mean and anyway that’s how I want to end this thing when the end eventually comes is to somehow tie all of this back to Blogging somehow.

Somehow somehow somehow I’m gonna make this work, I’m telling you. Yeah, I mess up and I don’t always post when I say I’m gonna. Yeah I’m broke and can’t afford to keep up with new games and current technology in order to write intelligently about the subject of gaming, and technology is this world that keeps updating and if you don’t update with it then you become irrelevant but I’m not FROM that world, dang it. I’m from Shakespeare and literature and video games that have stood the test of TIME, and everyone still plays Mario and Zelda because those games have been around for 30 years and they’re still gonna be around thirty years from now, me and my son will play them and THAT’s the kind of timeless I can hold on to here because yeah right now I can’t get a PS4 or whatever but I don’t need that crap because I can still the Zelda and talk talk talk talk talk about the games that impacted me over the years and yeah eventually I’ll get to play something new and the time will come when I can do all the things i want to do and this blog becomes the thing I see in my dreams.

Done.