(18 records of a saddle)
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(中文)
Reflections, Internet Girlfriends and J-Pop Fantasies
I’ve reached the point where I have too much unpublished writing floating through the depths of my hard drive, and it’s haunting me. Every night, as I try to fall asleep, I think of all my poor essays which will never be read, and I can’t help but break out in tears over their sorry state. If only I could do something for them!
The most obvious thing to do would be to simply finish each essay, one by one — to make them readable for the everyman, the kind of bearded lumberjack living in the Pacific Northwest that I imagine as my typical reader. However, despite my standards being quite low (as should be obvious if you’ve spent any time clicking through links on my website), I do in fact have a sense of shame. This is the source of most of my problems writing-wise.
The reason much of my writing has been left unfinished and unpublished is that it contains content I feel uneasy about releasing into the world as is. Whether it be embarrassing stories of my past, admissions of horrible guilt, or simply badly phrased sentences — whenever I’m perfectly at ease and sit down to write, I always seem to go in directions that, once ventured, spark the sudden and pressing need for self-censorship. Being removed from this writing by time makes it slightly easier to release it into the world, but upon rereading it I still find myself wanting to say more. Moreover these fragments typically aren’t substantial enough to feel publishable on their own without a huge amount of additional work I no longer feel inclined to do, as removed as I am from their point of conception.
So I’ve come up with a compromise: rather than editing my essay fragments or continuing to work on them, I’ll publish several related fragments together as is, noting their dates of composition, then add my commentary, written by current me. Maybe this can serve as an inter-temporal dialogue with myself. At the very least, it might prompt me to finally write down certain thoughts I’d been wanting to put into writing for months or years.
Essays:Contact me at saddleblasters [at] gmail [etc]
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