4 out of 5 Strange Bedfellows Agree
Less Is…Less
I’ve been following an idea, an ideal, of simplification. I’ve been streamlining, removing the extraneous to expose the necessary. Like most folks, I dig my fair share of excess, of accumulation of things and people and prejudices and assumptions. All those things are useful to one or another degree, and anyone who claims otherwise has issues. You don’t take a broken man’s crutches until he’s done with them. But when he’s done with them, well, they’re just clutter in the hallway closet.
So, you take the crutches to Goodwill. Maybe someone else can use them. You realize that—no matter the strength of your good intentions—you’re not really going to sit and diligently pour your way over the stack of books you’ve spent not a few years and Benjamins building with the vague hope that—once you’d reached some kind of critical mass—you’d just start absorbing the material. You decide that there’s nothing wrong with the fact that there’s no fitting back into your old clothes or simple notion of right.
You decide to find your core, the fundamental engine of all that you are and do. You used to think, posit, and you used to write, so now’s the time to be getting back to that. Yes, writing. How to do that. Computers can help, but they’ve too much potential for distraction. You decide that you’ll roll your own, so to say. Boil it down. Yes, boiling things down is good. Everybody’s doing it, the boiling. So you boil down your blog design, you boil down your operating system, combing diligently, looking for all the nits. ‘With unnecessary layers of abstraction removed’, you think, ‘synapses will fire and fingertips will tap and words will appear and somewhere lightning will strike, telling the world to wake up and get ready because HE is writing again.’
Peeling Onions
Except…well, except that removing all those layers takes time, energy, fastidious investigation. You’ve got to dig through CSS and Wordpress files. You’ve got to dig through xorg.conf and your Openbox configuration files. You’ve got to solve fourth-order partial differential equations with an abacus (to get back to basics), solving, of course, for the perfect position and assembly of tools and perspective and worldview and lighting and keyboard angle and headphones and you’ve always been meaning to get into fighting shape so carpe diem mother fuckers because today it gets painful for punk bitches.
It’s one thing to clutch your crutches after their days of utility have passed. It’s quite another thing to hoist yourself up on your compulsive search for perfect crutchlessness. Because what are you afraid of? You embarked on that compulsive search to free yourself from yourself, from who it is you’ve convinced yourself to be, so you can just be. Yet, there you are, at 2:30 a.m. and your furious keystrokes aren’t filling out a NaNoWriMo entry. You aren’t putting the final touches to an alternate history novella exploring what might’ve happened if Da Vinci had made good on his flying machine. You aren’t even writing poetry. Hell, not even poetry? No, you’re stalling.
You’re afraid, not of what you don’t know, but of what you do know. See, no matter how many contrivances and distractions you array against your wits, you know what’s at your core, you know how your engine works. It would take a bigger man than you to just ride it…or would it?
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