10.16.2002

 

I really stressed myself out over last night’s failure of a post relating to Airport Song. Looking at it a little more than twelve hours later, I think the stress of work and the other changes that have started affected my life over the last few months have finally started to catch up with me, and last night’s inability to write about something so important probably exacerbated matters to the point where I wandered around my kitchen staring aimlessly at the counter and wondering what to do with myself. But after not giving myself enough time to sleep last night and a delightfully hot shower this morning, I think I have a little more perspective.

I think a lot of people tend to blog on the fly and adopt something of a stream of consciousness approach to their craft. Two of my favorite blogs use this approach commonly, and ten times out of ten they put together something great because of it.

I think I am very anal about my writing, and even though I hate editing and revising, I nonetheless tend to take more than a cursory amount of time with posts. If a post is not going so well, I’ll save it for later. I’ll put it on my list of topics to address at a later time. Usually this is no big deal: sometimes the writing simply does not come to me when I want it to do so, and sometimes I have to get out of bed at 3 in the morning to write something down that will not go away.

I didn’t even think about doing this with the Airport Song post last night. I realized right away that I could try to write that ongoing chapter of my life 100 other times, or give it months to develop, or whatever writing strategies you would wish me to employ, and it still would have come out as a miserable failure.

Last night this really upset me. Today I feel somewhat glad that I cannot write it.

I think my inability to write about something can speak volumes about the importance of the topic matter. I’m not one to frequently be at a loss for words, or sit and try and formulate the right way to say something. So when I do struggle to describe or sit trying to craft a sentence, you should realize that I am either extremely angry and trying not to snap at you or I am so overwhelmed by the moment or the emotion that any words cheaply thrown down with no previous thought will constitute a simple waste of breath and listening effort.

So what am I saying? I think I want to convey that my inability to write about Airport Song says infinitely more than anything I ever could have written. This sounds, and feels, like a complete cop out, and if that’s how you want to understand it, I will not protest. But for the rest of you: take it on faith that my failure at writing something very important speaks volumes. As I said yesterday, Airport Song and I have way too much history, emotion, change, anger and devotion to even try to adequately address it. And so while I could tell the procedural history of my relationship et. al. with Airport Song, the important stuff is what underlies all that history, those nights spent rollerblading down the Venice boardwalk at 11 at night, the afternoons strolling around the waterpark and the evenings spent rolling around in bed.

I can hint at all that. But I cannot get it right.

But I hope you understand how much this limitation says about Airport Song. So much that I don’t even have a single self-deprecating joke this morning.

Back to my silly blogging starting now,
Chris