Holy Mother of Bombast!

... did a search for my own website and read myself quoted out of context...

Apparently my impulse to write is suscitated by some inane demiurge who revels in the purple gore of slaughted prose and gloats over the sacrifice of my human dignity.

*harrumphs like a victorian spinster*

Shocked and appalled, I am, just shocked and appalled.

Can't get enough of my narcissism? Read onwards!

I've always been neurotic about writing -- must have exactly the right word in the right place, can't trust that a scrap of a paragraph can illuminate a world of thought so must write five words where one, or none, will do; and then I moil and toil through Sisyphean rewrites, so the whole damn thing stretches on to take up all of forever.

How embarassing to discover I've foisted this onto the world when this self-concious, self-absorbed phase ought instead to be quietly smothered between the sheets of private journals.

They say it's a phase that every writer goes through... emphasis on "through" in the "and out the other side" sense.

I don't want to go through it, in the double sense of the word "through": I don't want to have to suffer it in the first place; and yet, paradoxical soul that I am, I don't want to move on from it.

There's something very security-blanket-like about a very tightly woven paragraph baffled with words and stuffed with fluff. It provides the comforting illusion of substance when I'm grasping at the intangibles of reality-at-large.

(Why couldn't it be like thumbsucking? At least thumbsucking has mythological precedent.)

I know I've got to make the effort to leave it behind someday, I just don't want it to be now... not yet... not while I'm still having fun writing this turgid crap.

You poor dears. You're just going to have to suffer a bit longer.

Posted by edgar at March 14, 2003 01:10 PM