december 10th, 2021

i think a good practice regarding the things i type publicly is to pretend that there is exactly one other person on earth
who remotely feels like i do about things & if i don't give myself an honest & fair voice then they will be totally alone

december 17th, 2021

my feelings are that no one is the only one capable of writing "what needs to be written," but everyone is each,
themselves, the only one who they can conceivably trust to write it - insofar as they can trust themselves to make
themselves capable of doing so, & from there put in the effort to. this has the feeling of conferring onto myself
& everyone, on the basis that we are alive, a frightening obligation to try to read & grow & from
there to try to write with earnest & benevolent intent every day if possible

but then, as everyone does this, they come to fill & overflow the limited bandwidth of attention that any of us has to offer!
there is a deluge of signals & meanings & sentiments, packed like the atoms of a brick wall, impenetrable, each signal
a candidate seeking to carve out a space in our awareness, earnestly trying its best with good intent in its heart, ideally

there's no way to experience it all within a lifetime. it seems impossible to impose any order on what comes. the sheer
number of these neat, ordered crystallizations of life experience ironically causes them to become analogous to the
chaos that first produces life experience... sure, there is curation, & the establishment of literary canons,
but it feels kind of arbitrary in relation to the scope of all that is & can be written!

in the act of writing, one can never count on being heard, but it seems like the best they can offer is still to play a "drop
in the bucket" role, of inviting the possibility of being heard, so as to strive to maximize the goodness & honesty of that
chaotic totality of written work, to the minuscule extent that they are capable. no one person will ever grasp this totality
of work, but it must be made maximally good, so that each one person's limited perspective of it will be maximally good

one can count on chains of inspiration: the possibility that each occurrence of good & honest publication could set off
a cascade of them, which i guess would frame all of this as a self-reinforcing process, a pattern in the chaos, that each
would seek to accelerate, or accelerate the acceleration of, blah blah... that's what i'm trying to do with this post!
writing about writing, trying to articulate these rationales, for myself & for anyone who could experience
any benefit in taking them into mind, in the case that they make sense & are agreeable

november 19th, 2022

if i imagine never writing anything it puts into perspective how the only other output i could know myself by would be the
disconnected half-thoughts i'm capable of unconfidently stringing together in the heat of realtime conversation, which makes
writing the only way i can actually know that i'm more than just whatever fragmented thing is constituted by all of that