June 28, 2019. That’s when I made this document title, marked since with an X for in-the-works. “X – Readability Score: Needs Improvement”. I’d just started this website – funny it’s coming up to a year, doesn’t feel like it (today’s April 12, 2020) – and the robo-reviewer that came with WordPress kept telling me this message. My paragraphs are too long, my sentences likewise, my writing I guess just too disjointed and undigestable.
Something along these lines. I knew there was something funny in it, an idea for me to chew on. Readability Score: Needs Improvement. At first, ouch. Ego, pain, denial. How funny, how rude, it just doesn’t get it, it doesn’t get me, it cannot hear, it cannot comprehend. My words speak to great truths! The highest peaks require the greatest effort in climbing!
So I told myself.
So I lied.
Even in the first run, I knew I did not have it. There was something beneath the surface I could not yet see, and so no, I just put it aside for “the future”.
Here we are, then, today, in the future.
I go back and read some of my writing and think God, what pretension, what a cunt. What wordiness and arrogance towards the attention of the reader, the audience.
I think:
So all the world’s a stage
then we all end up players
If we want to be a part,
from the cast
Or else in the audience
The crew, director –
The staff
Then I think, more pretention. Who wants to read a poem, the trite symbolism and beat of some random “man”. [Men always seem to resort to the beats, ha ha]
But I don’t know if it’s defense, or I alight on some truth, but another voice takes up arms and says write. Who cares if its pretention, who cares if it’s bad, who cares for you don’t write for them. You write for posterity, you write for yourself, you write for the improvement of the craft. Put it out there to be seen, put it public so they can judge, contribute to the common pool of confusion seeking answers in the muck. Who cares if you’re wrong, nobody really ends up right, we care if it’s interesting or helps out in the great always fight.
My ego needs a defense, my soul needs a purpose, so I want to name it with grandeur but it all ends up trite. This is my stabbing at art, my indulging with philosophy, my masturbating over religion and it’s part. Of course I sound arrogant, of course I sound shite – I want to scream: for we have been crafted to turn away from the light! We are dumb, we are lazy, we are untrying and lame, we are unworthy of our ancestors enduring their what’s today beyond our imagination suffering and plight. We throw away the strengths that got them through those long nights, and then cry at our daze and depression.
Yech, ech, blech, gross. What bile it brings up in my throat.
Stop being so mean, stop being so angry, you are the one that’s going to have to change your perspective.
Yet I’m angry at so much, angry at the lack of care all around. Angry at the chains continuing to rattle in our ears, down the years, no matter how many Marleys visit and warn us to change before it’s too late, we depart.
Yet I know I must improve. It’s on me: I’m largely trite, I am too angry, I am increasingly unwise. My writing needs to better, my sensibilities adapt, my expectations taken into moderation with the times.
So I will. So I’ll try, as I can. Some background brain/being doctors might say at that last sentence “Ha! He allows himself an out before he starts!” and perhaps, maybe, they are right. Yet I repeat then the one before it, and say expectations are tempered by the times. It’s new, in truth, this self-examination without the crux of outside institutions as guide. Therein lies the catch.
My last truth in this writing: we are no one if we are without a tribe.
All I want is independence, freedom upon the Earth, but it’s a child’s dream of utopian worth. We are none of us Gods alone, masters of the all, there comes a point where we die or we depend upon the dreaded someone else. Reputation staves off death farther than much else, saves us so that others, lessers, can go on having stories to tell.
That’s all that it boils down to really. Stories, and tribes, egos, and truth.