Cycle

Yesterday I wrote a big, lofty piece on writing philosophy. I didn't mean for it to get so 'important'. It had its origin in a status update. As I said then, I hardly seem to post those anymore, and figured that it was because I was writing so much for this blog now. I tried to address the terrible shortfall over on Facebook, where I had gone so many times to write an update only to come up empty. It's an uncommon thing to find oneself bereft of any idea worthy enough to make into a status update. Actually, I should say that it's a very common thing, but it's more uncommon to keep from going ahead anyway.

Well, this time I started to write one about how I don't write them anymore. I like to be brief and concise, so that's generally my objective. I don't always manage it. One line became two, and two became three. Before I knew it, I had a full-blown paragraph which had no hope of being read all the way through by anyone in that forum. I myself would skip past it. Keeping my nose to the grindstone and reading long uninterrupted text is no easier for me than for anyone else, my ability to write such text notwithstanding.

I had failed in my attempt to write a status update. I sighed, then copied and pasted what I had so far into the form for this very blog. It had swallowed up another though, as early Los Angeles did every body of potable water for many miles in its infancy. This blog takes for its own every thought I have which is fit for the attention of others. I keep from it only such offal that I never repeat to a soul. That's nearly true, anyway. More true would be to say that I hold back only that which I'm uncomfortable with everyone seeing. A select few get a bit more, but I doubt whether they are grateful to be deemed so special.

So it was that I had again had my hopes of writing a status update dashed. Was I entirely thwarted though? I'm glad to say that I was not. It occurred to me that I might just have something for a status update if I added one more meta layer. I had been unable to write an update about how I didn't write updates anymore. Instead I managed to write about how I had tried to write an update about not writing updates anymore, but that I had fallen short again. In that failure, I found success.