2019.07.22
Once, in an exuberant state, feeling filled with the muse, I told another writer: When I write, I know everything. Everything about the characters? she asked. No, I said, everything about the world, the universe. Every. Fucking. Thing. I was being preposterous, of course, but I was also trying to explain the feeling I got, deep inside writing a first draft, that I was listening and receiving, listening some more and receiving, from a place that was far enough away from my daily life, from all of my reading, from everything.It made me think about my usual excuse for not pushing myself to write fiction: on some level I see fiction as a selected window in a constructed alternate reality - but that fictionality reality has to be like an entirety, it shouldn't just be this tiny world where the only thing happening is what the author wants to talk about, free from cause and effects outside the narrative window. And man, that's just too much responsibility! (Also, some podcast said, yeah, everyone has that idea in the back of the head for a movie or show or comic or game whatever... and I really don't, and as someone who would like to think of himself as creative that seems a little sad.)
Form is all we have
to help us cope
with fundamentally chaotic
facts and assaults.
Formulating something
is a great start.
I trust form,
trust my feeling
or capacity
to find the right form
for something.
Even if that is only by being
well organized.
That too is form.
The Real ID Act - in October 2020 you're gonna need a specially verified driver's license to get on a plane or enter a federal building. Looks like in MA, it's considered an option to get a license with "Real ID"-ness included, and see my own license would otherwise not need to be renewed for a few years after the October 2020 deadline. So, countdown til lots of people, worried either about their personal inconvenience or for another tool for big brother, notice this and start complaining.