Reflections in a Golden Mug

I started jotting down thoughts first thing in the morning around ten months ago, after some family trauma (the infamous Birthday of 2006) and a lot of frustration with respect to serious writing. All the books -- or at least most of them, or maybe only some of them, or maybe just the ones I've read -- say that you need to write something every day, on a regular basis, whether it's good or bad. Get up in the morning and pound the keys for an hour, two hours, whatever it take. Set a goal of 1,000 words a day.

I'm sure this works for someone out there, but it clearly hasn't worked in my case. It's possible that I just didn't stick to it long enough, didn't write for long enough, or just didn't believe hard enough. The Tinkerbell theory, if you will. My Dad was one of those constant writers at one time. By the time I met him, he was a full-fledged father with family responsibilities and I was a brand-new infant with no ability to recognize or understand what it was that the giants in my life were doing. But my grandmother used to say that he wrote constantly, that he said he "couldn't help it. It just comes out." And maybe that's what real writers do. Except that my Dad never did "serious" writing. No novels, no short stories that I know of. I don't even have any of the articles he wrote for that magazine he edited.

Then again, I don't have any articles from the magazine I edited, either, but only because we never published a single issue. Fame, it seems, can be exceedingly fleeting.

So there it is. Some people feel compelled to get the stories in their heads out, to put them down on paper (or record them as a pattern of electrons), to somehow etch them in some medium for posterity. But perhaps there are others -- maybe like me -- who let the stories play internally. My Dad was an extrovert, an entertainer. Almost everyone that I've met who knew him speaks of his wit, his humor. I, on the other hand, am probably a reasonably funny guy, but with me it's more of an intellectual exercise. Puns are the wordplay that my chosen language compels me to create. I don't know why; I just know it's something I'm driven to do.

Random observation: If you want to get your heart broken, fall in love. If you want to get your heart broken on a regular basis, fall in love, get married, and have children.

I suppose that's a variant of "to err is human, but to really screw up requires a computer."

So what, I wonder, happens to all the stories in my head? There's the little kid and the carousel and the teddy bear; there's any number of people who live in Calamity Falls; there's the guy who spots his doppelgänger in line at the store. Damned if I know what happens to them, but they all exist, waiting to have their lives fleshed out for them. And here I am, waiting for the time to make that happen.