Wasting Words

I think I may need to start Writing some Really Bad Prose. Just vomiting it out, watching it slosh everywhere, letting it dribble down the drains. Pour enough out of me until it starts to filter into Mediocre Prose. Because while I think I will never be a Prose Writer, I feel like there is some kind of vague connection between the relative quality (as I perceive it) of prose I do produce (i.e. almost exclusively this blog at this time) and how I relate to / project / reflect on myself. Not completely clear on how this relation is laid out, and not saying I produce my best in times of self-contentment and worst in times of self-loathing,  but there's something, hiding between correlation and cause and effect. I have the creeping fear that my ability to express myself is degrading, and degrading quite quickly.
I used to keep a traditional journal/diary, writing about my day thoughts experiences etc, but that has dissolved into scribbled diaryesque "poems"--not because the medium of poesy is better for expressing my life (though it is) but because that is the only shape my grasping, fragmented and sprawling, inarticulate attempts to describe can mimic. The amount of question marks in these poems has been growing. I flip back through the pages and their numbers make me anxious, an assault force of doubt assembling.
I flail about with words trying to recreate whatever is echoing in my head, and generally it's a pretty frustrating process. When I do this for sentences and paragraphs and at the end there is nothing insightful or revealing or even charming and witty to show for it, it just makes me... sad. And very impotent. Talk may be cheap, but I believe there is absolutely such thing as a waste of words. I also believe I do it all the time. And if I am going to claim words as the tools of my trade, it seems disrespectful, wrong, to go on wasting them without acknowledgment. So here's to slaughtering words relentlessly and hoping their corpses pile up enough to support something more beautiful.

..

I get headaches (or perhaps singular, a headache) every evening now. Internal pressure expanding with no definite point of origin or concentration, just an amorphous distraction of pain. I figure it's  a) a godlet making ready to emerge from my head   b) my body telling me I need to give some serious consideration to my life w/r/t waiting tables  or   c) I need to get my sinuses Roto-Rootered . Today, the buildup has started early. Guess that means I'm getting a headstart on the day. Ha. Guess I'll see where it takes me.

And I'm upgraded daily / All my wires without traces

Today I went shopping for a smartphone.
As of right now, I have a semi-dumb phone that can make all my texts and access some parody of the internet, and even once in a while I use it to make phone calls to other real people. I have no real problem with the phone; with the exception of the inevitable temper tantrums that all the machines I own seem to throw it works quite well. However, for various reasons, I decided to take the step and move into this strange handheld collective world in which everyone else seems to be cheerfully participating.

This is kind of a big deal for me, for complicated reasons of superstition and cyborg anxiety that I hope one day to explore. Suffice it to say that watching people chat not with other people through the phone but with the phone itself makes me visibly and uncontrollably nervous. (I have several friends that find it amusing to team up with their cohort Siri to exploit this tic of mine. I love my friends very dearly.) I myself have been in the past incapable of figuring out how these devilmachines function. When attempting to use a borrowed one I'm generally reduced to helpless flailing and pawing at the screen like a sad animal until the savvy owner takes pity on me and dials the phone number or what have you.

It turns out that this is a real disadvantage when trying to be a wise consumer selecting a smartphone for purchase. If I am overwhelmed by sheer panic at just the sight of any flippy animated screen with higher resolution than the outside world that may or may not been able to read (or at least infer) my thoughts, how in the devil am I supposed to qualify and evaluate the differences among these damn things? Comparing them on a website with nice side-by-side boxes of written out specs is one thing. Holding even the 3 generation old model in my had and knowing this machine is smart enough to do anything but I am too dumb to tell it how is something completely different. Why am I doing this again? Haven't I consumed enough sci-fi to realize never to volunteer for the omnipresent, omnipotent, life-easing upgrade?

[Interesting and slightly troubling sidenote: A large part of the reviews of the HTC One X, one of the phones I was considering, are these weird exultations by former iPhone users that read like escapes from bad relationships: "i love love loooove my HTC. i used to stick with iPhones because even though i was never a big fan i figured i could never get anything better but then i made the leap with this [hone and its so great! i would never even consider going back to iphone" "This phone is great. It never gives me any problems...I never even think about iPhone anymore!"]

And how exactly am I supposed to explain all this to the pleasant young man standing at my shoulder just trying to earn his commission? I'm sorry excuse me sir I'm just having a bit of existential confusion about my commitment to my cyborg identity. No no I know I'm up for an upgrade I'm good for another two years yes. Yes no I heard you about the megapixels thing but it's just is it better? Will it make me better? How much of my soul can it capture in high def? And do I have to download it or can I stream it?

This post would have had a better punchline if I were publishing it with some wry acceptance from a smartphone. But, all things considered, I made what I thought was the best decision in the situation: retreat. Live to fight another day, maybe postpone the Singularity that much longer (ha, unlikely).

[Alternate ending: I'm secretly a robot!]


Will end by reiterating my cyborg anthem, Regina Spektor's "Machine":