I used to write to textualize fantasies and day dreams. The pandemic with its zoom calls and intimate distance was fertile ground for jotting things down. I would drop them on my blog and feel accomplished. A little less hollow after another meeting. I thought I was funny. Or somehow sage. Often they were indeed just fantasies as I had co-workers whisked into adventures henshin super hero style.
In the tenth grade I read a snoozy short story, Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and can't remember a thing save the guy day dreamed of planes and adventures. I would re-read it save the very teacher who assigned it to us, re-connecting years later on Facebook, apologized to me for making us read it. "Im sorry I made you read that silly story, but looks like you made it!"
Everything jotted down was a Walter Mitty type aside and, in a new environment, not sure if I would have the same feelings or time. I wrote during hollow moments in a job already plateaued. I had reached a point where the flow, however hectic, had enough cadence so I could swim through the ebb and flow and find 10-15 minutes where it was OK to do anything but work.
In college, a creative writing class introduced me to the short stories of George Saunders, specifically CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. It's good but note that at last check I think Saunders had been, as popularly and freely applied today, "cancelled" for sexual harassment. But, damn, were those good stories and I appreciated that, before writing, he had miscellany jobs. Here was someone who just bounced from being a cook to oil derrick technician to writer. I think of that when I think of something I should jot down on the blog if even for minor eyes. The lonely Russian porn bot reading this.
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