something I am grateful for today

filling a hole in my Mighty Chris collection



I've been trying to find this album for over twenty years. And sometimes I have been able to find it -- for $100+, used. Which has never been doable or justifiable for me -- not even for the sake of my Mighty Chris collection. At last, I managed to find a copy [used, of course] for $12. Now that's more like it. Cue sigh of relief and contented little smile.

Stream of Consciousness Sorta - 20190117

Paisley recently reminded me that about twenty-odd years ago, I used to do automatic writing practice. Just sit at the PC and write whatever came to mind, try not to stop, try not to go back and revise, I think I aimed for about fifteen minutes, today I would be happy to reach ten actually. She reminded me because she mentioned that she recently started to do this every day. Resolution, discipline, whatever. And I remembered that I used to turn up some astonishing insights into myself by doing this.

Back then I got the idea from reading Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones. Before writing this now, I found myself looking up Natalie to find out whatever happened to her. She kept writing, of course, and from the sounds of it mostly writing about writing. I also gather that she has had some second thoughts about Bones but I am gonna stick with what it said for the time being. A million plus people got something out of that book besides me, so I figure there must still be something of value therein.

Anyway, Paisley's goal is to hang onto these daily blurbs, go back to them, and see if there is anything of salvageable value in them. In her case I think she means ideas for Proper Stories. For me, I might mean that. God knows I'm desperate enough for ideas for Proper Stories, I struggle hard enough to find each one I've ever had. Wonder how many of them are actually good. I feel like every story I tell has been told to death long before me. Then I remember seeing things like there are no new stories, the only thing that's new is how you tell your version of it. Guess I gotta cling to that and hope that it's true.

Trying to be brave here and post this instead of writing it in a private Word doc on my PC. I guess I'm hoping that sometimes there might be something shareable come of it, and I can take off the privacy filter. Shareable in terms of hey world, here's something about me that I'm not afraid for you to know. Not necessarily shareable as in here's something you might find worth your while. Be interesting to see how often and how long I can keep this going.

Anyway, this first one, I am gonna make non-private, as an introduction to what these blurts are and where they come from. So that if others appear publicly in future, you can understand where they came from and why they are suddenly and randomly showing up apropos of nothing. TBH it sorta helps me to have a hypothetical audience to write to, helps the words flow.

Well hey, looks like I broke ten minutes, and now my hands hurt. Not as young as I was twenty-odd years ago. So I guess I won't try to push for fifteen after all. But if I can do ten minutes every day, or almost every day, I will be doing well. Go me.

**Addendum - I went back in after the fact to add formatting etc. for clarity and ease of reading -- my on-the-fly writing is not that neat. But I left the meat of the verbiage intact, for good or ill.