This Is An Experiment

An average reader-type person could read novels and short stories in a moderate quantity, say one novel per week, for her entire life, say 88 years, and, I believe, still not come across every single idea she’s ever had.

I am reading a novel right now, a brilliant novel called The Center of Winter, and the plot is similar to a novel I started writing once but not similar enough that I am in any way deterred from going back to finish my own story, someday.

In this way, a reader / writer-type person can convince herself that the ideas she has had, has yet to have, or, mostly, has yet to express, are interesting, unique, full of possibility. In the world of print fiction, that is.

Now the Internet. The Internet is as full of ideas as this entry is full of commas. It is possible, in one day exploring the Internet, to come across every idea you have ever had. Other people have had them, those ideas; the fully formed ones, the barely gestated ones, the ones you had at 3 am last week and didn’t write down. Other people are writing down their ideas and their thoughts and their idle chatter. And you can pull them up, out of the ether, on to your screen, in seconds.

Which is so demoralizing. And enlightening. And wonderful, if you are into collaboration and community. And horrible, if you are sick to death of seeing your own dull bafflegab on the screen.

Sometimes it feels like I used up my whole box of ideas (The Idea Factory shipped everyone a box a few years ago) and now it seems they’re out of business and won’t answer my emails.

(They’ve got this giant warehouse in Nowhere, America; someone is still paying rent on it but there’s only one woman there, sitting at the front desk, smoking cigarettes and playing solitaire, with real playing cards, while the emails flood in from all over the world. Every time the computer retrieves a piece of mail, it makes an old-fashioned beep and she flinches but she never looks up. Or turns the computer off. Someone is paying her, but she won’t say who.)

But, says me, what is important, after all, is that your expression of an idea, whatever the idea, is unique and interesting.

After all, there is nothing new under the sun.

(I did not come up with that phrase.)

I want to feel inspired. I do not feel inspired. I want to write stuff here that I would enjoy reading if I wasn’t me. Currently, this is not the case. I feel like I am filling space, taking up valuable internet idea space with snake-chasing-dog-chasing-snake bullshit that even I remember writing before. So in that way, it is like a paper journal.

And yet.

It’s wet. The leaves are wet. They are yellow and red and brown and wet. It’s dark. I want to sleep all the time. Maybe I am a bear.

If I was a bear, I would stand hip-deep in water all day and catch fish with my giant paw. I would spear the fast flowing salmon with a huge claw and then slam that fish in my mouth so fast it would still be alive and wriggling all the way down to my empty bear stomach. My fur would drip and my eyes would shine and I would occasionally lean my head back and bellow at the sky.

I might almost lose my balance, that’s how far back I would lean my head. So far back my neck would be exposed to predators but let’s face it, who is my predator if I’m a bear. I own this forest.

Rawr. RAWR.

I was going to do the boring thing and quit blogging. You’ve read it and I’ve said it before – it’s a noose, an albatross, a choke chain, a poorly placed trap door; it stares at me with its baleful eyes every time I walk past it to do something else.

But. I think I won’t. Not just yet. I own this forest.