By John McDonnell
I grew up in a family of eight, and we lived in a three bedroom house. These were not bedrooms as we think of them today, however. Three of my brothers shared a bedroom that was the size of a walk-in closet in a modern house. My sister actually did live in a closet -- her bedroom had been used as one by the previous owners.
Downstairs, there was a living room, dining room, a half-bathroom the size of a telephone booth, and a modest kitchen. After a few years we converted the garage into a TV room, but by today’s standards it was a tiny house for eight people.
And yet, it never seemed cluttered.
My mother liked things neat, and she trained the children to pick up after themselves. We had no multi-purpose furniture: e.g., the kitchen table had nothing on it except food. The flat surfaces in the house were always visible and uncluttered. There were no areas that looked like the back room in a junk shop.
Then why do I live in such a cluttered house?
My house has three times the space of the one I grew up in, and yet all that space is taken. There are stacks of mail on the dining room table. Sports equipment, lawn furniture, and power tools litter my garage. I haven’t seen the surface of my desk in years. And you don’t want to go down in my basement. That’s the place where old computers, toys, and furniture go to die.
How did this happen?
I like to tell myself that it’s because I’m a creative person and we creative types are not orderly or fussy about small details like having space on the kitchen table.
That could be true, but it’s also probably because my family has more of the detritus of modern life, more stuff than I had as a child.
How did I get all this stuff? I was raised in a family where my father grew up poor in the Depression, and he always acted as if he thought he was going to wake up one day and it would be 1933 again. He thought the world was crawling with people out to take his money, and by God he wasn’t going to let them have it. If my Dad spent money on something there had to be a dire need for it, and you were expected to use it till it wore out.
These days, when I’m looking for a book or a user’s manual or a gadget and I’m searching through all the clutter, I often find things that mystify me. “When did we buy this?” I ask. Or, “I didn’t know we had one of these,” or, “What is this thing?” Even, at times: “Did we actually spend money on this?”
I try not to be a sucker for every sales pitch that comes along, but my resistance breaks down more than I realize. You can’t get me to buy a pair of pants I don’t need, but for computers, gadgets, gardening tools or books I’m an easy touch. The rest of my family has different buying weaknesses, but what it all adds up to is that we play a vital part in the economic well-being of several Chinese villages.
Combine that mentality with a reluctance to throw things out -- in my family, if we own something, it’s understood that we keep it till the sun burns itself into a cold, dark cinder and the universe implodes -- and you can see why there is so much clutter.
I know you’re saying there’s always eBay or a yard sale to get rid of the stuff, but that involves making multiple trips to the dark corners of the basement, organizing, collating, and actually looking at things like those Sesame Street sing-along videos we kept for 20 years since our kids outgrew them, and once that happens we get teary-eyed and decide we can’t part with them, so they go back in the box for another 20 years.
Maybe that’s what clutter is, the accumulation of sentiment. It’s the souvenirs we pick up along the way, and no matter how trivial they seem, they all have meaning. Even that electric bill I found in the back of my desk drawer, the one from the first apartment my wife and I lived in, is hard to throw away because it has meaning to me (“Honey, do you believe how little they charged per kilowatt hour back then?”). I can’t part with the stuff I’ve been dragging along, no matter how much it’s slowing me down.
Someday all this clutter will be thrown away, or it’s going to end up in the closets and desk drawers of my children, just like clutter has been passed down to me from my dead relatives. It goes on forever, does clutter.
Maybe that will be my ultimate legacy, my gift to future generations. My great-grandchildren will have things like restaurant receipts and old magazines and the model airplane I built in 4th grade to remember me by.
That will probably give them a more accurate picture of my life than anything else, because what is life all about anyway, if not clutter?
THE END
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Friday, October 22, 2010
Soccer Memories
By John McDonnell
In a few weeks my daughter’s soccer career will be over. She plays for a college team, and this is her senior year. Her school is a six hour drive away, so my wife and I have only seen a handful of her games in four years.
We will be driving down to see her play the next two weekends, and it will be an emotional time for us.
Whenever I sit in the stands and see her playing at the furious, physical pace of college soccer, I can’t help but think of the little girl in a ponytail who started playing at four years old on a coed team where the boys wouldn’t pass her the ball, and she seemed more interested in picking dandelions than in playing her position. The ball would routinely pass her by while she stared at cloud formations, and the adults would try to refocus her by jumping up and down on the sidelines and screaming.
Has it really been 17 years since then?
I’ve seen a lot of soccer in the intervening years, and it’s a sport I never played or really cared about before. My high school didn’t even have a soccer team when I was there, and it was a sport I thought was only played by people with names like Reinhard or Carlos.
When your child likes a sport, though, you dutifully learn everything you can about it, and become the world’s biggest fan. I coached my kids in soccer when they were little, trying to hide my ignorance with a few insider terms I learned from books. “One touch!” I’d yell, not really sure what that meant, but it sounded good.
I stopped coaching when the kids were old enough to raise their eyebrows at some of my strategic moves, which was usually when they hit 9 years old.
It’s been a grand adventure, as every part of parenting has been. I’ve had to learn skills I never dreamed I’d learn, play roles I never thought I’d play, speak a language I never knew before.
There have been injuries, games played in the pouring rain or freezing cold, games that were won or lost in the last seconds, stubborn coaches and mean-spirited opponents, medals and trophies won, friendships forged, tears and laughter in abundance. I put thousands of miles on our car shuttling my kids to tournaments, stayed in budget hotels and ate too much fast food. I gave up weekends to man the hot dog stand when our team hosted tournaments, pushed my creaky joints to the limit in backyard workout sessions, shelled out thousands of dollars for uniforms, team fees, equipment, cleats and whatever else my soccer players told me they absolutely had to have.
I’m sure I’ll reflect on that sitting in the stands this weekend. I’ll look at that woman who’s flying down the field with the smile on her face, the same one she had when she was five years old, and I’ll cheer her and wonder at the mystery of time, that it seems like only yesterday when she was picking dandelions in the middle of a soccer field.
I’ll probably shed a tear too.
It’s been a great ride.
In a few weeks my daughter’s soccer career will be over. She plays for a college team, and this is her senior year. Her school is a six hour drive away, so my wife and I have only seen a handful of her games in four years.
We will be driving down to see her play the next two weekends, and it will be an emotional time for us.
Whenever I sit in the stands and see her playing at the furious, physical pace of college soccer, I can’t help but think of the little girl in a ponytail who started playing at four years old on a coed team where the boys wouldn’t pass her the ball, and she seemed more interested in picking dandelions than in playing her position. The ball would routinely pass her by while she stared at cloud formations, and the adults would try to refocus her by jumping up and down on the sidelines and screaming.
Has it really been 17 years since then?
I’ve seen a lot of soccer in the intervening years, and it’s a sport I never played or really cared about before. My high school didn’t even have a soccer team when I was there, and it was a sport I thought was only played by people with names like Reinhard or Carlos.
When your child likes a sport, though, you dutifully learn everything you can about it, and become the world’s biggest fan. I coached my kids in soccer when they were little, trying to hide my ignorance with a few insider terms I learned from books. “One touch!” I’d yell, not really sure what that meant, but it sounded good.
I stopped coaching when the kids were old enough to raise their eyebrows at some of my strategic moves, which was usually when they hit 9 years old.
It’s been a grand adventure, as every part of parenting has been. I’ve had to learn skills I never dreamed I’d learn, play roles I never thought I’d play, speak a language I never knew before.
There have been injuries, games played in the pouring rain or freezing cold, games that were won or lost in the last seconds, stubborn coaches and mean-spirited opponents, medals and trophies won, friendships forged, tears and laughter in abundance. I put thousands of miles on our car shuttling my kids to tournaments, stayed in budget hotels and ate too much fast food. I gave up weekends to man the hot dog stand when our team hosted tournaments, pushed my creaky joints to the limit in backyard workout sessions, shelled out thousands of dollars for uniforms, team fees, equipment, cleats and whatever else my soccer players told me they absolutely had to have.
I’m sure I’ll reflect on that sitting in the stands this weekend. I’ll look at that woman who’s flying down the field with the smile on her face, the same one she had when she was five years old, and I’ll cheer her and wonder at the mystery of time, that it seems like only yesterday when she was picking dandelions in the middle of a soccer field.
I’ll probably shed a tear too.
It’s been a great ride.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
The Lost Art Of Conversation
By John McDonnell
My wife has cousins in Ireland, and they came to visit last week. We did some sightseeing, went out to a few restaurants, took them shopping.
Mostly, though, we just talked.
The Irish have a gift for talking. Words flow out of them with the ease of a river flowing downhill, and if you stop and ask directions of a stranger in Dublin, like we did last April when we visited, you’ll probably get a story along with the directions. Indeed, the cab driver who took us to the airport was as glib and expansive as a standup comedian.
Last week we spent a lot of time with the Irish relatives just sitting around the kitchen table, drinking tea and talking.
It reminded me of how little we do that in America these days. I don’t remember the last time my family sat around the kitchen table with anyone and just chatted. We’re always too busy to sit down, there are too many deadlines to meet, schedules to keep. My children don’t know what it’s like to talk without purpose, to simply talk for the sake of talking.
It wasn’t always this way. When I was a child in the 1950s and 60s my grandparents, aunts and uncles would regularly stop by our house and visit for awhile.
They would sit in the kitchen or the living room and talk. Conversation was something that was valued. The children sometimes took part, sometimes not. Even if we were too busy to sit and talk, we could still hear the conversation from wherever we were in the house. I remember many times being sent upstairs to do my homework, but instead sitting on the floor in the hallway listening to my aunt tell stories about her pals in the Notre Dame Subway Alumni, or my uncle and father talking about playing stickball in the street in South Philadelphia when they were boys during the 1930s.
There were arguments, too -- during the Vietnam War years there were raging arguments about whether we should be involved in that war, and during the Watergate years there were many heated discussions about Nixon’s crooked machinations. When John F. Kennedy died there was anger and sadness, but the conversation was a way for them to vent their feelings at a time of tragedy.
I learned a lot listening to those conversations. I learned about history, I learned about morality, I heard a few secrets that I wasn’t supposed to, I learned how to be part of a family, a community, how to be a human being.
I worry that my children are not learning those things.
Where is the art of conversation today? Is it flourishing through text-messaging, Facebook postings, e-mail, instant messaging? Technology lovers will tell you these social networking tools are a good thing, that they’re helping people to make connections, to stay in touch with folks who live far away, to reestablish ties with friends from long ago.
In a way that’s true; through Facebook and e-mail I’m reconnected with high school friends I lost touch with 25 years ago. It’s nice to chat with them online, but these short, truncated messages, a few sentences on a screen, are not the same as sitting down across from someone and talking with them for an hour or two. Social networking is good for short bursts of information, quick hits, an update or two. An in-person visit with someone is different. When you have time to relax and just chew the fat you never know where the conversation will lead. It can twist and turn, loop back on itself, strike off in new directions. You have time to tell a story that everyone’s heard before, without the fear of someone impatiently looking at his or her watch.
The Irish know this. They pay no attention to the world and its busy rush when they have a chance to talk. A story or an anecdote is worth taking time out of your day for. A visit and a chat are important things. Talking, just talking with no particular point or sales pitch or punch line to deliver, is a good thing in itself.
I miss those days in America.
My wife has cousins in Ireland, and they came to visit last week. We did some sightseeing, went out to a few restaurants, took them shopping.
Mostly, though, we just talked.
The Irish have a gift for talking. Words flow out of them with the ease of a river flowing downhill, and if you stop and ask directions of a stranger in Dublin, like we did last April when we visited, you’ll probably get a story along with the directions. Indeed, the cab driver who took us to the airport was as glib and expansive as a standup comedian.
Last week we spent a lot of time with the Irish relatives just sitting around the kitchen table, drinking tea and talking.
It reminded me of how little we do that in America these days. I don’t remember the last time my family sat around the kitchen table with anyone and just chatted. We’re always too busy to sit down, there are too many deadlines to meet, schedules to keep. My children don’t know what it’s like to talk without purpose, to simply talk for the sake of talking.
It wasn’t always this way. When I was a child in the 1950s and 60s my grandparents, aunts and uncles would regularly stop by our house and visit for awhile.
They would sit in the kitchen or the living room and talk. Conversation was something that was valued. The children sometimes took part, sometimes not. Even if we were too busy to sit and talk, we could still hear the conversation from wherever we were in the house. I remember many times being sent upstairs to do my homework, but instead sitting on the floor in the hallway listening to my aunt tell stories about her pals in the Notre Dame Subway Alumni, or my uncle and father talking about playing stickball in the street in South Philadelphia when they were boys during the 1930s.
There were arguments, too -- during the Vietnam War years there were raging arguments about whether we should be involved in that war, and during the Watergate years there were many heated discussions about Nixon’s crooked machinations. When John F. Kennedy died there was anger and sadness, but the conversation was a way for them to vent their feelings at a time of tragedy.
I learned a lot listening to those conversations. I learned about history, I learned about morality, I heard a few secrets that I wasn’t supposed to, I learned how to be part of a family, a community, how to be a human being.
I worry that my children are not learning those things.
Where is the art of conversation today? Is it flourishing through text-messaging, Facebook postings, e-mail, instant messaging? Technology lovers will tell you these social networking tools are a good thing, that they’re helping people to make connections, to stay in touch with folks who live far away, to reestablish ties with friends from long ago.
In a way that’s true; through Facebook and e-mail I’m reconnected with high school friends I lost touch with 25 years ago. It’s nice to chat with them online, but these short, truncated messages, a few sentences on a screen, are not the same as sitting down across from someone and talking with them for an hour or two. Social networking is good for short bursts of information, quick hits, an update or two. An in-person visit with someone is different. When you have time to relax and just chew the fat you never know where the conversation will lead. It can twist and turn, loop back on itself, strike off in new directions. You have time to tell a story that everyone’s heard before, without the fear of someone impatiently looking at his or her watch.
The Irish know this. They pay no attention to the world and its busy rush when they have a chance to talk. A story or an anecdote is worth taking time out of your day for. A visit and a chat are important things. Talking, just talking with no particular point or sales pitch or punch line to deliver, is a good thing in itself.
I miss those days in America.
Monday, October 18, 2010
The Waves At The Shore
By John McDonnell
When you lose someone you love, the wound heals but the scars never go away.
This past weekend I took my daughter to a soccer tournament at the Jersey Shore. The rest of the team stayed at a hotel, but we stayed at my mother’s summer home. It’s been in our family for over 50 years, and some of my earliest memories are of summer vacations spent at that house. It’s the one thing in my life that I still have from my childhood, because it’s basically the same house that I remember going to as a five year old.
So, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised at what happened.
All weekend I kept noticing white haired people everywhere. Older men and women, walking to the beach, riding bikes, strolling along the main street at night, waiting in line for ice cream cones, eating lunch at the local sidewalk cafes. I took my daughter to Mass on Sunday morning, and we were surrounded by senior citizens. There was a choir, and they were the picture of serenity in their sky blue robes and their white hair.
There was a simple reason for all these seniors. It was October, and the families with young kids were gone from the beach community. The kids were back in school, the adults back at their jobs and houses and lives at home. The community was given back to the older folks, the ones who’ve retired there or who own summer houses that they use after Labor Day, when the young people go back to their busy lives in the city. Some of them may even have come down for vacation in October, preferring the quiet of fall to the noise and heat and cotton candy atmosphere of summer.
Looking at those older people, I suddenly had tears in my eyes. Why did this affect me so?
Because my Dad wasn’t there, and he should have been.
My father died 17 years ago, at the age of 70, cut down by mesothelioma, a lung cancer caused by the asbestos he was exposed to as a young man in the construction industry. He died only 18 months after retiring from his job, and he never got much chance to spend time at the seashore house he loved.
He had put off his retirement till he was 69, working a few extra years to put more money away, but he fully expected to have a long retirement.
It never happened. He got his diagnosis in May, and died in September. He had one last summer to enjoy the seashore, but after a couple of weekends in June he was too weak to go back. The last time he was there he sat in his favorite chair and just looked around at the seagulls wheeling overhead, the cedar trees rustling in the breeze, and the families walking to and from the beach.
It was a tragedy, but I had put it out of my mind. I hadn’t felt the sadness in so long I thought it was gone forever. It came back, though, in a heartbeat. In the blink of an eye I was right back in the middle of it, my chest aching with the weight of tears, my eyes burning, my throat closing up.
When you’re a child you don’t think about endings. I was a child for a long time, but now I realize nothing ever really ends. You think it does, but it’s never really finished. All it takes is the right circumstances and you’re right back where you were before. Time is circular that way.
I don’t have an answer, or a neat ending, for this essay. I wish I did, but all I can say is that growing up is not easy, and that nothing is ever finished. The waves beat against the shore the same way they have for thousands of years, and the way they will for thousands more. You can lose yourself in their rhythm, or you can stop and focus on the passing of time. You can rage about the injustice in the world, or you can put it out of your mind and concentrate on the minutiae of daily living.
But it’s never really gone.
When you lose someone you love, the wound heals but the scars never go away.
This past weekend I took my daughter to a soccer tournament at the Jersey Shore. The rest of the team stayed at a hotel, but we stayed at my mother’s summer home. It’s been in our family for over 50 years, and some of my earliest memories are of summer vacations spent at that house. It’s the one thing in my life that I still have from my childhood, because it’s basically the same house that I remember going to as a five year old.
So, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised at what happened.
All weekend I kept noticing white haired people everywhere. Older men and women, walking to the beach, riding bikes, strolling along the main street at night, waiting in line for ice cream cones, eating lunch at the local sidewalk cafes. I took my daughter to Mass on Sunday morning, and we were surrounded by senior citizens. There was a choir, and they were the picture of serenity in their sky blue robes and their white hair.
There was a simple reason for all these seniors. It was October, and the families with young kids were gone from the beach community. The kids were back in school, the adults back at their jobs and houses and lives at home. The community was given back to the older folks, the ones who’ve retired there or who own summer houses that they use after Labor Day, when the young people go back to their busy lives in the city. Some of them may even have come down for vacation in October, preferring the quiet of fall to the noise and heat and cotton candy atmosphere of summer.
Looking at those older people, I suddenly had tears in my eyes. Why did this affect me so?
Because my Dad wasn’t there, and he should have been.
My father died 17 years ago, at the age of 70, cut down by mesothelioma, a lung cancer caused by the asbestos he was exposed to as a young man in the construction industry. He died only 18 months after retiring from his job, and he never got much chance to spend time at the seashore house he loved.
He had put off his retirement till he was 69, working a few extra years to put more money away, but he fully expected to have a long retirement.
It never happened. He got his diagnosis in May, and died in September. He had one last summer to enjoy the seashore, but after a couple of weekends in June he was too weak to go back. The last time he was there he sat in his favorite chair and just looked around at the seagulls wheeling overhead, the cedar trees rustling in the breeze, and the families walking to and from the beach.
It was a tragedy, but I had put it out of my mind. I hadn’t felt the sadness in so long I thought it was gone forever. It came back, though, in a heartbeat. In the blink of an eye I was right back in the middle of it, my chest aching with the weight of tears, my eyes burning, my throat closing up.
When you’re a child you don’t think about endings. I was a child for a long time, but now I realize nothing ever really ends. You think it does, but it’s never really finished. All it takes is the right circumstances and you’re right back where you were before. Time is circular that way.
I don’t have an answer, or a neat ending, for this essay. I wish I did, but all I can say is that growing up is not easy, and that nothing is ever finished. The waves beat against the shore the same way they have for thousands of years, and the way they will for thousands more. You can lose yourself in their rhythm, or you can stop and focus on the passing of time. You can rage about the injustice in the world, or you can put it out of your mind and concentrate on the minutiae of daily living.
But it’s never really gone.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Hack
By John McDonnell
Hack.
That’s what I am.
Not somebody who tries to take over other people’s computers. Not an incompetent golfer. Not the act of trying to cut through a dense jungle. Look up “hack” in the dictionary and you’ll see those kinds of definitions.
No, I’m a hack writer. “A person, an artist or writer, who exploits, for money, his or her creative ability or training in the production of dull, unimaginative, and trite work; one who produces banal and mediocre work in the hope of gaining commercial success in the arts.”
That’s me, with one exception. I’ve been a writer all my adult life, and I’ve always written for money. I’ve always been on the payroll somewhere, or freelancing for someone, bringing other people’s ideas into fruition on the page, doing other people’s work, in exchange for a paycheck.
The exception is this: Have I done dull, unimaginative, and trite work? Not if I can help it. Wherever possible I’ve tried to make the writing come alive, to inject my personality into it.
That’s not always possible when you’re on someone else’s dime. In those kinds of situations, sometimes you have to just shut up and do the work. However, I’ve always tried to do the best job possible, no matter what the circumstances.
Why did I become a hack writer? Because I love writing. I learned to read and write early, and I never stopped loving it. I love the world of words, I love books in all their forms, and I love the act of writing. If nobody paid me for my writing I’d probably still do it for free, sitting at my computer stringing words together till long into the night.
The other reason is that I did it to pay the bills. It was a way to make money, and I had a family to help support. The money was decent, and things were fine for many years, but its gotten to the point where I’m tired of submerging my personality. Sure I love writing, but I want to do some writing for me, to exercise my personality. I want to see “By John McDonnell” on a piece of writing I did. When you spend your life writing what other people want you to write, you’re in danger of becoming nothing more than a ghostwriter, a particularly appropriate word. I don’t want to be a phantom, a spirit who leaves no concrete mark on this world when he walks out the exit door for the last time.
I want to write about me, John McDonnell, for a change. I want to write about my hopes and dreams, triumphs and failures, quirks and idiosyncrasies.
So that’s what this is about. It’s about me as an individual. But it’s also about you, if you’re tired of submerging your personality because other people want you to, or because you were always a good boy or good girl, or because you didn’t want to offend, or whatever other reason. Maybe you want to write something totally stupid for once in your life. Or say something you’d never say in public. This is a place to do that, to celebrate individuality, to break out of your shell.
I have no idea what direction this blog is going in. The postings will not be directed at a marketing “niche”, and they will not be SEO friendly. This blog is not designed to rank high in Google, or any other search engine. It is a haphazard, stumbling, random thing that will talk about whatever’s on my mind at a moment in time. It will probably be ungrammatical and even incoherent at times. I’m going to write my posts rapid-fire, and I won’t care about niceties. This is about emotion, individuality, personality.
It’s not about hack writing.
Hack.
That’s what I am.
Not somebody who tries to take over other people’s computers. Not an incompetent golfer. Not the act of trying to cut through a dense jungle. Look up “hack” in the dictionary and you’ll see those kinds of definitions.
No, I’m a hack writer. “A person, an artist or writer, who exploits, for money, his or her creative ability or training in the production of dull, unimaginative, and trite work; one who produces banal and mediocre work in the hope of gaining commercial success in the arts.”
That’s me, with one exception. I’ve been a writer all my adult life, and I’ve always written for money. I’ve always been on the payroll somewhere, or freelancing for someone, bringing other people’s ideas into fruition on the page, doing other people’s work, in exchange for a paycheck.
The exception is this: Have I done dull, unimaginative, and trite work? Not if I can help it. Wherever possible I’ve tried to make the writing come alive, to inject my personality into it.
That’s not always possible when you’re on someone else’s dime. In those kinds of situations, sometimes you have to just shut up and do the work. However, I’ve always tried to do the best job possible, no matter what the circumstances.
Why did I become a hack writer? Because I love writing. I learned to read and write early, and I never stopped loving it. I love the world of words, I love books in all their forms, and I love the act of writing. If nobody paid me for my writing I’d probably still do it for free, sitting at my computer stringing words together till long into the night.
The other reason is that I did it to pay the bills. It was a way to make money, and I had a family to help support. The money was decent, and things were fine for many years, but its gotten to the point where I’m tired of submerging my personality. Sure I love writing, but I want to do some writing for me, to exercise my personality. I want to see “By John McDonnell” on a piece of writing I did. When you spend your life writing what other people want you to write, you’re in danger of becoming nothing more than a ghostwriter, a particularly appropriate word. I don’t want to be a phantom, a spirit who leaves no concrete mark on this world when he walks out the exit door for the last time.
I want to write about me, John McDonnell, for a change. I want to write about my hopes and dreams, triumphs and failures, quirks and idiosyncrasies.
So that’s what this is about. It’s about me as an individual. But it’s also about you, if you’re tired of submerging your personality because other people want you to, or because you were always a good boy or good girl, or because you didn’t want to offend, or whatever other reason. Maybe you want to write something totally stupid for once in your life. Or say something you’d never say in public. This is a place to do that, to celebrate individuality, to break out of your shell.
I have no idea what direction this blog is going in. The postings will not be directed at a marketing “niche”, and they will not be SEO friendly. This blog is not designed to rank high in Google, or any other search engine. It is a haphazard, stumbling, random thing that will talk about whatever’s on my mind at a moment in time. It will probably be ungrammatical and even incoherent at times. I’m going to write my posts rapid-fire, and I won’t care about niceties. This is about emotion, individuality, personality.
It’s not about hack writing.
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