Dangerous Reason to Write

We’re all in a strange state of humanity.  Technology moving like a bullet through the tangles of a powdered wig.  As always, old things are dying, new things are being birthed, no different than fly larve on a carcass.  College kids are as sensitive as ever.  Their parents equally irrational.  Corporations are drunk with power, feasting on natural resources and vomiting in the gutters.

Then there’s me.  Sliding past thirty years old.  As much angst as any teenager.  At the prime age where boners and the knowledge of what boners are capable of collide with a crash.  There are plenty of thirty-year-olds who've already tapped out.  They’ve given up dreams in order to follow tradition.  Given up freedom to accept security.  They’ve pushed out children and buried themselves under heaping, festering mortgages. 

Physically, the same can be said, for most. They’re round in the middle.  They move slowly, painfully.  Their hearts beating too fast for the resting state in which they hunch.  Hunched before screens and phones and streams of nonsense like alters.  Returning to them, day after day, faithfully, religiously, like zealots, like fiends.  They’re done improving — in thought and in physique.

That’s the end for them.  I refuse to check either of those boxes.  And I’ve got this ace up my sleeve — the craft of writing.  Writing as a pursuit has more than a host of ill side effects.  It’s a viciously solitary act.  I lock myself in dark rooms.  I build bunkers in bookshops, and coffee shops and slam my head against the keyboard.  It’s an alienating art.  It exposes the deepest, most vulnerable parts.  It often holds too much truth - an insulting level of honesty.  Or too little truth, an act of deception and exaggeration.  It is not a tightrope, but the edge of a sword on which I chose to walk.

The good:  the good comes with the relief of sitting and writing, creating something that would otherwise have not come to be.  Not in the exact capacity, at least.  There’s a redemption factor, an ongoing learning curve, and an outlet like slamming an axe into a coffee table.  Writing allows a full spectrum of expression, intimacy, sensitivity, and aggression.

I carry with me a subtle rage, a sharp-toothed scorn toward a multiplicity of things.  Also, love, but that is not what concerns me.  Love can be managed.  Love has a longevity that can endure into the crumbling landscape of old age.  A good wrath, violent intentions, hostility — these things spoil.  The body weakens over time.  The testosterone decreases.  The left hook slows.  The right hand softens.  Handicapped by arthritic rotator cuffs and brittle bones.  Movement, the power to strike instantaneously, without hesitation or momentum, these things eventually diminish.

This is why I’ve accepted writing, not as a passion, but as a fuel.  The elixir, the fountain of youth.  So long as I can scratch words down on paper, I can maintain this fury.  With the written word, I can express slit-throat insults and vehemence and the firecracker spirit that sits in my chest.  Writing peels away the expiration date.  The adventurous soul, the curious aggression — writing gives it an extended shelf life.

I imagine this shelf life lasts as long as I can make an intelligible sentence.  When it fades, I assume death will be easy and abrupt.  There is no generic spice of life.  But I do appreciate, and require, some heat, spiciness.  Writing allows that.

Years from now, when the physical jabs aren’t as sharp as they once were, words will cover the spread.  I find that necessary…the ability to run through walls, to dance freely, to fight, to love and express love, whether in three-dimensional space, or on a sheet of paper. 

It’s a good time to be a writer.