It Has To Start Somehow
This web log will have three parts: a
beginning, a
middle, and an
end.
Here is the
beginning:
It's true that you only get one chance to make a first impression. But then again, with a blog you're going to make that first impression over and over again as new people read it. I spent a long time agonizing over how I was going to start this, ranging from anecdotes to stream-of-consciousness soul dumping. I love to quote, as you may have noticed from the definitions I put up first; but at some point you have to stop reading from a book and speak for yourself. So two weeks into this project, I'm finally ready to start talking, and I've remembered that my greatest strength is my honesty. So I'm just going to be candid.
Greetings, people of the internet. My name is Robin. This is my Thought Sink.
I came up with the idea of a thought sink years ago but didn't think it was good for anything other than an e-mail address that everyone mistakes for 'thoughts ink'. Once in the distant past I made a very brief attempt at a blog; the blog was excrement of the most noxious order. Interestingly enough, I started it for very nearly the same reason, if not with the same intentions in mind.
Because sometimes
I just can't get the thoughts out of my head. Thoughts that tear on the wall of my skull like a Tasmanian devil; both like that animated tornado of claws, a devouring maelstrom, and the real thing, a violent born-rabid bloodthirsty rat-wolf that fights with a sheer nuttiness beyond all bounds of reason and looks forward to being cornered. And they want
out. There's this pressure on my head like the things are throwing themselves bodily against the back of my eyeballs, like bombs are going off and my ears are popping from the blast wave; and it sounds like someone constantly scanning with an AM radio, like I'm watching all the televisions in the electronics department at once when they're all tuned to different channels. And it doesn't make any sense, even to me, it's all just frenetic randomness, beating down the door, then gone again like a storm at sea leaving me adrift with smashed rigging. Like a face you see for a moment in the swaying leaves of a tree, and then it's gone. There's no order. And sometimes I just think if I could only squeeze my head
hard enough the thoughts would pop out of my head and into my hands and then my hands would
do something. My hands move a lot, when I 'm thinking, just making motions in the air that my brain must be telling them correspond to my thoughts, but it looks to me like I'm twitching.
That stuff I just wrote, that's what I meant by stream-of-consciousness. I'm going to try and keep it to a minimum because it makes my hands start moving around and then it's hard to type.
I don't do anything with my thoughts. I don't write or draw or train or perform or play an instrument with them; I let them foment in their bone prison like a dream deferred. That's why I need a thought sink, to relieve the pressure.
But a sink is not a vent. It does not blow off all your accumulated energy in one explosive release, wasting it. A sink is a steady, controlled, drain. It absorbs, fills up with, and becomes imbued with what it sinks. It is a conductor.
And more than that. It is a
conduit. Because a sink has to go somewhere. This thought sink-
my Thought Sink- leads to my hands. I am going to get the thoughts out. I am going to force them out through the tips of my fingers. I am going to learn to use my hands.
And I'm going to do that because I am looking forward again, not because I have to cover my ass, as I have in the past, but because I want something from the future. And for once I am going to get what I want from life,
So help me God.
My thoughts have been telling me for a long time that I may have a rather large and complicated idea. I don't actually understand it myself, and it may in fact not make any sense at all. It is almost undoubtedly unoriginal. Furthermore, I don't have the least inkling how to even begin to communicate it to someone else, and it is not terribly likely that it has any practical application.
And I don't expect anyone out there (*is* there anyone out there?) to be willing to listen while I stumble through it.
Fortunately, for that last problem, at least, I have a solution.
I said I love to quote. The following is reportedly inscribed upon the tomb of an anonymous bishop installed circa 1100 A.D., in the crypt of Westminster Abbey:
"When I was young and free and my imagination had no limits, I dreamed of changing the world. As I grew older and wiser, I discovered the world would not change, so I shortened my sights somewhat and decided to change only my country.
But it, too, seemed immovable.
As I grew into my twilight years, in one last desperate attempt, I settled for changing only my family, those closest to me, but alas, they would have none of it.
And now, as I lie on my deathbed, I suddenly realize: If I had only changed myself first, then by example I would have changed my family.
From their inspiration and encouragement, I would then have been able to better my country, and who knows, I may have even changed the world."
I am going to change myself. I do not have to look hard to find something to improve; my life has been a pile of shattered fragments as long as I can remember. I stopped attending college, I have no job, I am unfit, I have exactly four friends in the world whom I do not see as they are in college or elsewhere engaged, and in short, I have no life.
But all this will change. And I will write, here, about how in the hell I figure out how to change it. And maybe after I've learned all I need to know to manage my life, and shown someone that I can do it, then maybe I will have learned to understand myself, and to explain myself, and someone will be interested enough to listen.
This is it for me.
It was late when I finished that. The computer deleted half that post and I had to re-write it from memory. Now it is much later, and tomorrow is, as always, a big day. To anyone reading this before bed, I wish you sweet dreams, and that you wake rested. Good night.
