Had only a couple kids — well, 5 or 6 — seniors here last hour as juniors in Rhet & Comp went to veterans’ day assembly (responding to that is the topic for today). I feel confident this morning after writing journals about how editing my writings for blog feels like work. And I also had thought on drive in today (a snowy, 45-mph hour drive — though I did pass a car on Route 72 eastbound, which car was doing only 35 mph) that I actually don’t want to be famous — not if I have to try to impress others — that would go against the whole aspect of my ideas that look not at myths or stories or extremes but at what’s here and now (though would it be OK if I got famous by being dull? Well, maybe, though maybe I still wouldn’t want to be too influenced by trying to amuse readers (as that fan letter I got at Daily Illini screwed up my process and my writing mind. That’s jeez, 23 years ago now and I still refer to it. I did write for AgriNews and WILL since then, though I never got fan letter. I did get recognized by clerk at a bookstore (Borders?) once and that was weird.
But maybe that’s the last time I wanted to try to be clever for money/fame/attention — I mean, Deadspin was clever but tediously so. Maybe I can be — can start to be — confident in my obscurity (and not bitter). That being obscure is, if not the point, then it’s adjacent, because my point is to be honest, to just be. Well, not to “be” anything but to write just what comes to mind to write when I sit down and write my journals each day, like this one here (though the pocket pages notes are more about the ideas themselves, maybe). Here I am now — I don’t want to be remembered later.
A literature of being alive now: the Maynard Ferguson “Macarthur Park” and the students with heads down, mostly done with journals — but see, even labeling what’s before me and with me isn’t the full point. It’s just nowness. It is now as I write this. I’ll be another now should I come back and read this. Of course I have hundreds of books filled with now-writings and of course none of them can be thrown away — they’re not drafts but originals! Live-to-paper performances!!
[From school journal of Mon., 11 Nov. 2019, 4-5 hour., Journal 312, page 74-5]
MonkeyMoonMachine 