Hosea meets Ella Price

A week ago I griped about how I don't like work, and about how updating this blog looks and feels like work.  Sounds like the logical place to go from there would be to stop updating, wouldn't it?

But maybe I need to think about it a little longer before I let myself do that.

A couple weeks ago, ... or something like that, I don't quite remember when ... I went on-line impulsively and ordered a bunch of books by Dorothy Bryant. (Incidentally, if you don't recognize the name you should run, not walk, to your favorite place for ordering books -- be it an on-line site or a real-live store -- and get anything you can find by her.)  For years I had read only two of her books: Miss Giardino and The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You.  I kept telling myself that "some day" I would buy some of the others, and so a couple weeks ago I ordered a bunch of them.  They have started dribbling in, and while I am well into one of the novels (Confessions of Madame Psyche) I have been riffling through the other books as they arrive.

One of these is her very first book, Ella Price's Journal.  It purports to be the daily journal of a middle-aged woman who goes back to school and takes a writing class which requires that the students write something every day.  She does it because she is supposed to, and of course the journal records how she changes as she pursues her education.

But the whole point of keeping the journal, in the context of the story, is that it's a vehicle to help you think.  By writing down whatever happens to be going through your head, you unfold it and see things in it you didn't see before.

This is hardly a surprise.  In some ways it is just what I said when I first started this blog back in December of 2007.  It is similar to the explanation I have often heard for why to meditate, viz., that just by sitting still and being quiet you allow yourself to hear the ranting going on in your head that you'd been ignoring up till now.  And it's borne out by an exercise my current therapist had me try recently, in response to a good-bye letter I got from Debbie.  (More on that in my next post, I guess.)

The only thing is that these reflections make my whining about "work" sound a little childish.  If the whole point is to help you think, then choosing not to write means ... what, choosing not to think?  Sure, I can do that.  Booze would help too, come to that.  Only somehow I have to wonder if that's really the direction I want to go.  Have I done all the thinking I need to do these days?  Do I understand everything I need to understand?  Well, I don't so much care about understanding my relationship with Wife any more, because I don't really have one (or not much of one).  That's why I started writing in the first place.  But I do have to admit there are things I don't understand yet.  I don't know what I want to be when I grow up, for one.  And the prospect of never knowing is kind of unattractive.  My father has never figured out what he wants to be, and he's 78.  He has spent the last two or three decades dithering unproductively, and at this time he spends most of his time either trading jokes online with his old Army buddies or attending seminars on how to get rich quick by selling insurance.  It's a little pathetic.  So maybe that's not where I want to end up.

And this leaves me with the thought that maybe, just maybe, I should get my ass back in gear and start posting regularly.  Not necessarily about this or that -- not necessarily about anything -- but just forcing my mind to push my thoughts through my fingertips and out onto the screen. 

It would be a lot more restful to kick back and forget it all, but it's probably not a good idea.  Well, hell.