Homecoming

14 October 2006
Arsenal 3-0 Watford
Stewart 33' (og)
Henry 43'
Adebayor 66'

I return to this project with no little sense of failure, no little sense of embarrassment. It quickly has become a public display of what I've privately known for sometime: I completely lack any ability to finish what I start. Over the years, I've had a variety of writing projects for myself, to keep busy at school and on vacation, to keep at the 'hobby' I wish to make a job. Of the handful I can remember, I believe I finished one of them, and that wasn't even prose, it was a screenplay, which requires considerably less writing than a novel (they are, in fact, 80% dialogue, which is about as easy to write as it is to ejaculate with your hand and some pornography). On top of the projects I start (and don't finish), there are countless projects I think about, wish to write, and then leave in the dust as if they were nothing but fanciful notions better suited for the past. Sometimes that's a fair assessment, and sometimes it isn't. At least one of the screenplays I started a couple years ago is actually interesting, and merits revision; I doubt it will ever see any work again though. In fact, my hard drive will probably crash and I'll lose any trace of it. It will become a shifting memory in my head that (if I'm lucky) I'll get to ramble about in some arduously long interview with a college student I'll have at the ripe old age of 75. I refuse to let this project (I use that vague noun way too much, but it is hard to describe whatever I am doing here with any other more specific name) turn out the same way. You argue that it won't because it's on the internet, google has probably already cached it: the hell with you, that's not what I meant. I refuse to let this project die the slow death so many of my writings have been subjected to. This sudden 360 of action, one minute I'm ignoring it for months, the next I return with a passion equal to that which possessed me in September, is due in equal parts to an article by Milan Kundera and my current writing project. The article, which makes for more interesting discussion, was a short piece he put together, comparing Flaubert, Proust, and Cervantes. His goal was to extract the nature of being a novelist (as compared to being a poet, or a musician) and he does so at the cost of Quixote, Bovary, and Albertine. What he determines a novelist's goal is to not expose himself for the sake of discussing his most worthwhile soul, but to expose reality for the sake of the reader realizing their most worthwhile soul. Thus, the value of the characters are not as figures of the writer's intent but as mirrors for the reader. Writers are egotistical and megalomaniacal because they believe they know people better than people know themselves; sometimes it's true, sometimes it's not. But such is what makes a writer. I read that and I realized I had already proclaimed similar things within this set of writings. I realized that and I knew I had to return here. I accept that this is now 80 percent about me as a writer: maybe it should have been that from the beginning. I still have the desire to discuss Arsenal, but the pace will be far off from their games in reality. It is almost 2007 and I am writing for 14 October; I expect the distance between my entries here and their games there (in London) to continue to grow. But that is not bad, except it may make discussions of 'current events' confusing or tiresome. It will lengthen the life of this project, and maybe I can even match it to that of Alcova. Alcova is my new writing project (hit the blogroll to the right for a look), one where I write a page (or whatever) a day. Every day. I've slacked off in the last couple days, but it's Christmas, leave me alone. The design is to force me to write, but I also haven't planned any of the story out, so I have little idea where it's going. I want it to stay fresh and persistent. So far it has suffered, in my eyes, from this approach: there is no consistent theme, and the voice varies considerably in a number of pages. But it is slowly coming into focus: how close the narrator should be to the characters, how long every entry should be, and so on. In effect, this will now serve to compliment Alcova. Alcova is entirely without a fourth-wall besides the blogroll: there is nothing to imply it is not a real story being told now. Invariably I have thoughts regarding it that I do not want to express directly on the website, and so I will have this to do such. Both are now experimental explorations of writing for me. I will be working on my novel, The Age of Lost Innocence, as well as these two webpages in the next year, and with any ingenius luck there will be a thread tying all three together like a lovely package of creativity. At the end, I may have three wholly unusable works, complimented by each other but equally defeated by each other, in that no one person would be interested by all three. But I may create an impressive cohesion of fiction, biography, journalism, and semiology to warrant some kind of study. Only time will tell but hell even if it doesn't, I'll be able to point to it and say, "look, I finished something."