Dear Diary: Natural Gas
A good day is like natural gas: it burns without leaving a residue. A good day for me, that is. The following list, of things that will not show up, one way or another, at one of my sites, will show why.
- I took a walk. (yay!)
- I made a BLT for lunch (necessitating the walk).
- I ate leftovers for dinner.
- I saw to the minimum personal and housekeeping chores (ie, I got dressed, I made the bed).
Everything else that I did, from the moment that I bent down to pick up the Times at the front door until right this minute, had something to do with — let’s be grandiose — amplifying my presence on the Internet. When I wasn’t reading or writing, I was commenting at Facebook or looking at tweets.
And now that I look at the list, I’m reminded that I’ve never written up my method of making BLTs, which yields sandwiches as good as if not better than the best that the city has to offer; so that may not belong on the list.
And it’s more correct to say that I took the walk because I was feeling very antsy after lunch. A letter that I wrote to a friend documents this. (Ought the letter to a friend be on the list of things that won’t show up on one of my sites? All too evidently not!) The walk restored me completely.
***
I spent most of my life afraid of the kind of work-commitment that I’ve made to Portico and The Daily Blague. I feared that such a commitment would choke all the fun out of life. And it probably would have done. By waiting until the Internet and then the Blogosphere got themselves invented, I was enabled to professionalize all my amateur interests — by which I mean nothing more serious than dealing with them on a regular schedule. I’m as moody as ever, but my moods have a lot less to do with how I spend my time. And the worst mood of all has been downsized from cumulonimbus to cirrocumulus. That would be my fear of not writing well.
That’s my abominable conceit for you: what I mean, really, is, the fear of not writing well enough. It will never go away altogether. There will always be projects that pose peculiar, rather occult difficulties. (It’s usually a case of wanting to write about something that I haven’t properly digested.) But the determination to sit down and have a preliminary go at something meets with a lot less resistance than it used to do.
I suppose I always knew that “practice makes perfect” would prove to be true even for me. What I never guessed was that even I would come to prefer doing the hard and boring site-related stuff to doing anything else. Oh, I don’t always. Not yet I don’t. But that I should ever prefer the hard and boring to the diverting surprises me greatly. I thought that I was missing that mental component.
***
The secret, I think, is to resist the sense of look how far I’ve come! As if I had arrived, once and for all, at some desirable position of self-mastery. It’s the moments of self-mastery that come to me — when they do. Tomorrow could be a howlingly bad day. Last week amounted to no more than a stretch of dented fender, thanks to brief but dismaying server and cable outages. Far from having found a safe harbor, I’ve exposed myself to a greater array of adverse contingencies; when I was a dilettante, far fewer things were crucial. And I do miss that. But I’d miss what I have instead a lot more.