If you were manage to get me into an empty field today and tell me to wait around until you came back, I’d probably take my phone out and start scrolling.
Through a confluence of personality quirks and circumstances, I found myself last night with this publishing platform installed and ready to go. It’s a genuinely endless, undiscovered field of possibilities.
Then I shut it down. I told myself that I’ve been here before every year or two since 2004, and every time I write a post or two, or maybe zero, and go back to anything else. I told myself that I wouldn’t have anything to say in this format, so I pulled my phone out and fucked around on Reddit before going to bed.
I’ve been here before, probably a dozen times in the last eighteen years since I stopped keeping a journal on paper or on a blog. It can be cathartic and a creative exercise if it’s doing its job. But it can also be a burden, primarily writing for an audience that exists only in theory.
But before I became a consumer, as a boy with imagination and curiosity and a strong tolerance for tedium, the field wouldn’t have been empty. Every field has rocks to pick up and throw.
Back in August of 2020, I found myself going back through my old Facebook posts, the entirety of my personal emails, text messages. I found playful, awkward notions, saving them to a twitter account I created for the purpose.
I'm like China in a bull-shop. #contextless
— Consider the lilies of the field (@toilnot) August 15, 2020
She held an ocean of guilt behind her eyes. In the morning, he would quietly wheel his way down the hall and watch as she leaned over the sink to let the sea spill back into the drain. #contextless
— Consider the lilies of the field (@toilnot) August 15, 2020
One step up on abstraction from the cat. It's counter intuitive but consider it is worse to get a goose in your walls than a cat. #contextless
— Consider the lilies of the field (@toilnot) August 15, 2021
And outside the shadows of context, they became bright and shiny to me. Probably only to me. And a bit of melancholy came through rewinding through the years: those pieces of polished soda cans and gravel became fewer and fewer as time wore on.
OED defines Koan like this: a paradoxical anecdote or riddle used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment.
Or Wikipedia describes a Koan like this: is a story, dialogue, question, or statement which is used in Zen practice to provoke the “great doubt”…
So I have my grass field, and my shitty little stones and road debris flew in by the wind. I’m not going to be taking down any birds with these, though. I have no Zen inside me, but I’ve got a whole pile of illogical reasoning and enough doubt to fill a pretty good-sized bag.
The boy is no major league player, though. He’s not going to take any birds out of the sky. I have no Zen inside me, but I’ve got a whole pile of illogical reasoning and enough doubt to fill a pretty good-sized bag. Shutting down the server in frustration last night was like the street lights coming on.
Even if you’re going to be generous and tell me that my Twitter account isn’t full of complete nonsense and garbage, at best, I’m just delusional and nostalgic, I still can’t even sit down and intentionally write one. I have to go back through and look for the voice that comes from an entirely different part of my psyche. And by “not one,” I mean “not one.”
The boy is saying to me, “Screw that. You pick up a rock, throw it and tell yourself that’s what you were aiming for all along.”
So, yeah, screw it. I’m going to pick up a rock every day for the next 1000 days. One bit of text - absurd dialog, sense questions, or a joke that will never have a punchline - freshly cast in this general format. No more than five hundred words of preambulating about like an adult followed by my best manic hillbilly impersonation of Zen master’s Koan.
Lemme get started with the first:
main()
{
printf("hello, world\n");
}
999 to go. See you February 25th, 2025.