It's catharsis, no? My hands clenched so tight, my plans crushed to dust beneath the might of anxious anger. Calcium gates closing and the sinuous railroads slides back, and the bindings of cells untie like an unknitting, an unzipping of flesh inside, and the muscles unwind and breathe, slowly, relaxing. Fingernail pits mark the prints where fingers once clasped as a vice. Like chaff, confetti, or dandelion seeds the dreams are ballooning into the sky.
Some drown in the ocean, or suffocate in the stones; some birds bear home, completing their nest. A few float forever, stuck in the winds of time, or land in the desert, shrivel and die. But a few, those dreams I never knew might fly so high, join the stars, or the fireflies, or the wildflowers on the mountainsides. I'm still staring through the holes in my hands, the paths between these unclenched digits...
Where do they lead?
These blind worms never link with anything externally alive, but they harbor life so defiantly. Where are you going, dear, without your hands, without your friends of fret and floundering, the lens of life? They crush and cradle, touch and trundle, and if they callous, it's kindness or it's careless. And they sweat in the catharsis of heat, and they fight or fly with equal ease. And now, across this keyboard they rap-taptap, popping keys with the inanity of fighting destiny, but they hope, believe, and tonight that's all we need.
I read endless blogs, news articles, stories, and sometimes I wonder if I should transform my rhetoric to follow the masses out there. Not necessarily as a means of subsuming my style into the majority, but as a practical means of mastering the popular. I don't think that's me, however. I don't want to argue politics or exclaim titles in all caps to garner attention, like "STUDY OF CATHARSIS: RESULTS YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE" or "TEN WAYS TO SUCCEED AT ALL YOUR DREAMS" or something equally banal. It's these giant blogospheres that are swallowing everything smaller by mass producing material. It's like that Donald Hall quote (and essay) that I've grown to love. America has once again managed to gobble up the voice of mankind and transform it into a marketable, consumerist product.
Blogs are popular? Okay, we can "mcdonalds" that, and serve fake-meat articles a hundred times an hour - something for everyone. And we've got fast food, but no cuisine, nothing palatable. I'm fairly certain that style isn't beyond me, but I'm not writing this for the consumption of countless blithe readers. This isn't a popularity contest in the slightest, as I'm really not advertising any of these nor attempting to harvest "followers" and "likes" and "+1's", because that would probably render me more grief than pleasure.
But I do still sometimes wonder whether I should attempt to fill this space with more meaningful content, content that can be engaged with, and approached with purpose. I rarely spend the time fleshing out ideas, as I've previously considered this space a hit-and-run, freestyle writing outlet that is an alternative to journal, story, and competition writing.
It's not edited, it's not a platform for some soap-box ideology. Occasionally I share ideas or philosophy, but this is more for sophistry than philosophy, anyway. I probably should write an essay now and again, though. I think something (maybe everything) in me missed school, and the continual, forced application of research to produce an argumentative, or expository, essay. I miss those. Forcing yourself to write them without a return is more difficult.
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