--Tangent taken from Page 154 of my Memoir. I haven't quite decided whether or not I am going to remove it completely, or if I'll instead just find some more appropriate place to insert it. I think a lot of it is repetitive, and most of it--as usual--overblown and archaic in description. It occured to me today that it is not a normal thing for a writer to never edit their work, to never draft, to hardly do more than run a spell-check. I write quickly and almost from beyond myself, and I rarely edit, and I never draft. This makes for a lot of mistakes, a lot of jumbled prose, but it also makes for something more raw and real, I think. When I "free-write" I sound positively insane, but when I consiously control the thoughts that swarm from mind to page, I am able to produce something lucid enough that it needs almost no-editing to stand as what I'm trying to get it to be: Me.

From
"The University"
"Part 3: Reclusions"


Machiavelli and the fight for what was rightfully mine were like the first tentative spark in the tender of who I once was; I wouldn’t have predicted the dramatic effects of my budding disillusionment, but this bundle of tender-wood, the cold ashen remains of what once burned with passion, would soon ignite again under the mentorship of a like-mind (though our minds seem akin, mine is surely but a fraction of his, my abilities never to catch the shadow of his brilliance as I trail behind his lead) and someday, again, my obsession with the written word would be incited and stirred to rising flames—the same flames I remembered kindling in my youth, when my prose was always effortlessly aglow with an authentic voice, even though it was little more than awful as a narrative—and this fire, which one professor would evoke from mere embers, nursing the needs of all things analogous to fire: giving me the room to breathe, to be wrong and erratic, in my writing and in school, to encourage me to silence my censor and ramble until something familiar and my own appears, emerging from the recesses of my dream-cast mind, my innate imagination returning to my work like an old brown bear roused by the coming Spring, seduced by season’s change to leave his cave; like the snow-bound bear my prose hibernated within me while the world outside was barren and fruitless. At first my writing was noticeably worn by the years of lethargy and, particularly with my first endeavors, for a while my words were this way—like something still somnolent from seasons spent asleep, visibly atrophic in both thought and execution, but eventually it all became something more: after many pages devoted to my natural narrative tendencies—writing like a madman rants—something real showed up, my imagination awoke from a sleepy-state of self-censorship; although, by this time, an entire decade had come and gone in the absence of real inspiration. So even if my current and still somewhat-pathetic excuse for poetry and prose is not yet a thing of beauty, it is nonetheless the most honest thing that’s ever come of me—so much so that I find myself peering into the pages I write as though they were a mirror made of my own words, and I have come to use my writing as a way of seeing myself clearly. But after the four-year war, at least I can wear my wounds with pride and quell the nightmares that speak of war with a kind of consolation—the notion that I am somehow better because.
As of now, I am able to stand aside from my former self and say I have been altered from my previous state to one I feel is more a-fit to me; the comforting cliché whispered in despair like country-church prayers, the hypnotic mantra I keep repeating, saying again and again to myself that by the triumphs and tragedies alike I am restored—but I know that, though the tragic times did change me, the parts of me that I know as myself were lost and forgotten until my last college course, and I would not know myself, nor would I even enjoy being the person who I was if I were to have remained that way and were as such still the same today—I remember girl as someone else entirely, like an old friend I used to know quite well but lost touch with her in time. That person who was so essentially antithetical to myself as I am in-truth would surely still be the cloak that veiled in-rigor-and-rhetoric the imaginative musings of my sleepy-soul, keeping it bound to bed-time journaling and bombastic critical reports, robbing my college years of any real artistic endeavor or self-expression, and this would certainly still be the same if it were not for one force acting upon the odd undulations of my obsessive and repressive tendencies—it was not by tragedy or even by victory that I was restored to a place of passion and it was not because I was fated to have a life trying enough to merit my telling about it that I always have a memoir in mind, but it is instead because of my last professor that I have the will and words to write at all, and equally it is because of this professor that I am a person I like to look at in my pages of mirrored self-image.
Further still, it was this last professor who gave me the permission I required to return to who I once was, and at the same time, made me into someone I’d always wanted to be—namely, a free and fearless conductor for a highly-charged and churning web of thoughts forever funneling above my conscious mind. Equally, it was he who first unearthed the writer within me, something innate to my very essence which in youth I had decided to burry alive, and there beneath my academic analyses and the day-dreams that numbed me from the pain of this drudgery, dulled the ache from a droning world, and within my well-ordered mind there laid a stirring within the grave, something still awake in the recesses six feet under my outward self, and though it was entombed beneath the layers of soil, each a passing year and another layer under mounds of monotony above it, still how quickly he shock the soil from the sleeping side of mind that loves to write as though no one will read it, and that corpse of a past-self quickly became the most active aspect of my inner-self, ruling the reasons for my every want and will.
More than merely coax my muse from the grave, this professor revived my writing and imaginative mind in-full, and in a matter of mere weeks. I never intended to write creatively again, and I had come to regard the ghostly aberrations of my forgotten self as a part of living a scholarly lifestyle, meriting a pat-on-the-back for every day I didn’t give into my imaginative tendencies, and when the process of smothering the breathe of my muse had all but silenced my will to write, it was a kind of silence inside my mind that I once heard described of the fallen house of Usher; the act of burying a part of myself beneath my active mind akin to the story of Roderick Usher, whom as I earlier discussed, buried his sister Madeline beneath their house while she still clung to the last of lingering life and the physical world, and because of her purely of-the-flesh existence (essentially, in a vegetative state) Roderick soon finds her to be little more than a pestilent reminder of the last of the dream-hindering tithes still binding him to his stake in the tangible realm and, as his twin sister—who was all present in body and absent entirely in mind, the antithesis thereby of Roderick—was the flesh-and-blood chains which shackled him to the world he longed to leave for his own mind, and as long as she lived, her very presence in the physical-realm would keep him from fully immersing into his intellect, her only existence linked to the very part of himself he so desperately sought to amputate, the genetic likeness of his antithetical sibling was the last thing still tethering him to the tangible, and so he decided to do with his sister as I did with my imagination during the peak of my academic obsession, physical depravation, and utter reclusion from the waking-world; equally there was another time during my college years when I performed this ceremonious burial of some part of myself, banishing it to the dirt and darkness in the forgotten underworld of my imagination: it was in my profound reclusive withdraw into my mind most primarily that I began to daily dig a deep hole inside myself, eventually it would become the plummeting gravesite to cradle my own body in soil, burry the demands of my flesh, over-turn the earth upon my physical needs whenever they would break my focus on whatever I was so intensely reading, writing or otherwise studying
This was not at all unlike the tale of how Roderick buried Madeline, as my perfectionist inclination prematurely placed my imagination in its untimely grave, both my muse and my physical attachment buried under earth where it remained through my college years, affixed beneath the surface side by side just under the house of my conscious mind, just as Roderick had buried Madeline, underground deep beneath the soil upon which the Usher house sat in a dilapidated repose, six feet or so below, somewhere not too deep and not too shallow, buried between layering soils and sediments somewhere just below dusty surface where immediate-memory grows and just above the lower depths where everything tends fade until forgotten, and in this hallowed crevice beneath the house-of-active-thought, therein I left the best part of me to rot in solitude, entombed to draw the last breath of life from within a ground-gripped coffin, my muse laid to rest before its time because I was taught to preserve ambiguity in academic essays at all costs, my narrative voice hush-fallen by my own hand, an unthinkable span time wasted on rigor and recitation, all the while the nagging call from that coffin-cast part of myself dissipating until it haunts only in sleep, whispering the words and phrase I never wrote, writing the stories I was too busy being scholarly to tell, so much of myself lost or maimed because a syllabus required it of me, and now I mourn my mechanical compliance with the requests of a jaded instructor; to quickly did I destroy anything uniquely my own in hopes of winning their favor in grade-point or praise.
In a matter of weeks my professor uncovered what I had long since left for dead, and while my muse survived to see beyond its internal grave, it was still as useless as a pile of old bones unless I could silence the voice within me screaming to stay true to scholarly style and not my own indulgences. My professor was quick to quiet my inner-censor, giving me permission to write whatever foremost came to heart and hand—without stopping to structure it properly, or to ask myself if that extra adjective really serves a vital function, or if a comma is extraneous, or whether or not I am using too many em-dashes—and from this honest, ugly, unbridled sloughing of imagination came hundreds of problem-wrought pages: countless lines left in fits and twists of strange punctuation, the arrangement of it all amounting to, at most, a filibusterous farrago of functionless metaphors—each like a labored breathe between the rushing tides of thought and text—the words huddling between punctuation and ordering themselves into tantivy tangles of love-worn alliteratives and fragmented phrase, many orphaned and unfinished, left to fend for themselves; so much of my work is filled with these fledgling clauses, each struggling to survive among the snarls and snares of shifting thought.
Still, even in the worst of my work, when I am really feeling self-indulgent, my tendency towards repetitive, long-winded digressions and heavily subordinated, clause-laden sentences are still a thing far greater than well-written rote; what could be more distasteful to eye and ear than my censored expositories—always I find that when I write for someone to read me, these sad, Sisyphean attempts to please an audience will prove about as fruitful as those aimed to earn the favor of the academy; both so fickle and unforgiving, especially when they read your work, as with regard to a audience and academy alike, they daily read with a growing disinterest and, when they do review you’re the product of your passions, even just a few pages of it, it is always met with the same cyclical series of sighs and scowls, and their source of displeasure is undeniably your foolish musings, just an unruly cluster of words like the fingerprints of a feral mind, this nonsense which you’ve been peddling to them as something functional and informative, and all that can be said for this is that the world would surely be lost without both the Zinsser’s and the Emerson’s among us: either our world would fall by way of the former—losing itself in frivolous fact and function—or else it would falter from the latter, and alas, our fangled world would be infinitely lost in a fool’s fanciful fadaise. For most critics and the perpetually unimpressed of their sort, nothing will satiate their hunger for something they haven’t yet heard, and when they read, they thusly read as so: first their focus is so festinate, then fastidious when they begin finding flaws.

For the Love of Sarah Lawrence

In applying to graduate school--at present, only to Sarah Lawrence--I've found myself more meandering than ever, writing entire pages under the title "Autobiography--My Life in 1,000 Words or Less" that has nothing to do with the arbitrary details of my life. I can't so much as manage a sentence giving my birth date, and the passage that began with "I was born in Tyler, Texas" was off to a fine start, but ended up 6 pages of shamelessly irrelevant musings. I cannot seem to commit myself to the simplest of tasks--like a truly obsessive compulsive person that cannot for all the world keep himself from washing his hands four times, or stepping gingerly over a crack in the pavement while crossing a sidewalk--I cannot even force myself to just say "My name is Erin Wheeler, I was born on..." even now I can't do it. It's so bland, it's blinding. I simply can't stare at a blank page and leave it with something so trite, so trivial, so essentially me in the worst of ways--the part of me that is so naked, stripped of the words that veil me in their light, the glow like star-spun twilight that radiates from my mangled passages, and I, but batheing in the beaming verse, hoping the lines that come from beyond me can seem my own, and can let me shadow in the path of their loveliness--their sanctity I can almost pass as my own.

And so as the deadlines grow nearer I find myself with pages of false starts, paragraphs on the red dust of East Texas when I meant only to mention that this is where I was born. But the words! Oh how they take me! I am ill with them, afflicted by them, in love with them. These words! These images! These pages and pages of battle between my mind and muse--it should not be so hard to make myself say just-a-simple-thing. Just the facts, ma'am.

But alas, I am weak-willed and cannot withstand the devastating temptation to hard on and on about absolutely nothing, just because it quells some plaguing inner thirst for a visible symphony of words which have so captured my soul and spellbound my mind.

My boyfriend wanted to test just how much I could possibly say about nothing at all, or about one thing entirely. So he devised a simple test: He asked me to take a subject that provoked a plethora of seductive imagery, about which I was really inspired to write, and then he told me to take just the tiniest minute detail about that subject and harp on that instead--I could talk about that one little aspect for as long as I wanted, and I should try and see how long I can really do so, but the rules were that I wasn't aloud to have what I call "chain-metaphors" (a metaphor that requires a metaphor that requires a metaphor until the original point and image are entirely lost to some image-laden simile-sick tyraid), only one metaphor per sentence. Also, I wasn't aloud to veer from the description or discussion of that one focal aspect upon which I had decided to write. Anytime I caught myself veering-off on some tangent, or trying to talk about something other than the focus, I had to stop the sentence right where is was and type [end]. This was supposed to show me some pattern in my logorrhea, hopefully to give me some insight into what it is that spawns the compulsive episodes.

So my boyfriend decided to give me a little help, a prompt, if you will:

This is a picture of me when I visited the Lost Coast, CA. I will go in to detail about this place when time allows me to do it justice, but as it were, I haven't that luxury as of now. Still, suffice to say it was a place of unwavering beauty, with black-lava-sand beaches sheltered amid the King's Range mountainside and the Humboldt County Redwood forests so beloved by Julia Butterfly and the like, this place is a refuge for all the brave souls who make it here--though uninhabited by man and ravaged by wild bears and lions, from the rock-cast rookeries -- seals that sing their siren songs from the stone-crest cove and the elk that bedded outside my tent, it was a place that few had stepped foot, most never even finding the place and others becoming lost along the way, being that there are no real roads going to the lost coast, only winding, contorting unnamed, unpaved roads that quickly wither into little pot-hole and pit-fallen trails, herding paths mostly, that made a narrow pass through the 8000 ft elevation of the unforgiving King's peaks, where Highway 1 planners had intended to hug the coast the entire length of the Pacific, and upon finding this 28 mile stretch of land, the mountain heights and sudden drops, the wild beasts and relic redwoods, the tsunamis that thrashed the shorelines creating the nightly thunder you hear from the forest, the washouts that often take the lives of adventure-avid surfers, and everyone who has tried to build here (with the exception of a small community called Shelter Cove) has died or been otherwise brutally thwarted in their efforts. This place is the last of forsaken shores, the only real untouched land--at least as close as we can get. The last of the secret places, where the little roads that tangle themselves across mudslide mountain-sides are only known by rumors and word of mouth, tips from traveling surfers and backpackers having survived the hike. I hiked ten miles of the coast with a 103 degree fever, sick with strep throat--after that, the fevers befell me too fiercely, and I was forced to turn around. Nothing will ever shake from mind the frightening frigid night spent camping on the coast, my selected site being in an abandoned national park over-taken by the bears and wild elk. This elk slept just outside my tent, nearing the fire in the midnight frostful hours to listen as I read "On the Road."

Anyway, the point to all that is so as to say this: The Lost Coast is, if anything, a place about which one could write endlessly (as I have thus above demonstrated), and it would be difficult then to write about only one aspect of such a strange and mysterious place. So that was my task.

I was to take all of my poetic images of the Lost Coast, and with all of it swirling and clamoring in mind, I was to write about only the sand. Just the sand. Nothing but the sand. The sand in every possible literary light, all the ways I could think to describe, define, relate or recall it, and to keep doing this until I absolutely run out of things to say about sand, or my fingers fall off from typing--which ever came first. But I was not aloud to break the rules:

1) no chain-metaphors

2)no tangents that lead off-topic

3)if I stray from the topic or find my metaphors leading to more metaphor, I was to stop the sentence immediately and simply type [end]. (this was supposed to give me some insight as to when and where my tangents start, and hopefully then, why.)

4)I could talk about sand as long as I wanted, use simile and metaphor to describe it, but I could not veer too far from this topic or write about some other aspect of the lost coast--a very difficult thing to do, even for one who likes to harp.

So here's how it went:

The Lost Coast
A Comprehensive Summation

(A Diagnostic Exam of the Extent of my Logorrhea)

In the end, it really all begins with the sand. The Lost Coast is lost to the greater population of the world, and even to those who seek it’s secret shores through mountain tops and countrysides, along roads unpaved, unnamed, twisting and contorting through canyon crevices until these snaking trails collide as if by mistake in an intersection made impassible by the [end].

The sand is what sells the secrete of this forsaken place, a wound worn on the western shoulder of our country, sported with a weary sense of pride, like the soviet shrapnel forever sunken to the shallows of subdermian flesh and from this tissue entombment you can see the profiled encasing wherein the seeds of war still wait for water to grow, still in the arms of the few, the proud, each more likely to sport a lost-coast scar, shoulders of erratically-limbed soldiers showing off war wounds and saloon tattoos framed by rolled up cuffs and blue collars, a bomb’s everlasting eulogy in a fibrous encapsulation embracing the twisted tufts of metal beneath the arm, [end]

The sand is a solemn wind-song cyclically oscillating on the beaded breathe of sirens, sunken ships swaying near the gray-cast ghost that will slowly sluff it’s silken robes of sea-breeze and the lapsing distance waning beneath the tidal chariot of rabid waves like arms outstretching to pull closer the shore, grasping at the black sands of the shore as one would if they had fallen down-cliff and as they cling to the crumbling sediments of salty mountainside they find the strangest of strength to cling to the heights above their heads and with all that amounts to man they force the rockcrest-mass to their chest again and again, and so as though in some dark hour clinging to cliff and life the ocean pulls its heavy ship mass closer still to the coast that intrepidly awaits to ensnare [end.]

The sands are sweet in memory but course upon the step of real-time, and the feet soon grow soar and sloughs the skin from generations protected by the secrete Zulu means of French-defeat, and as this forms it makes for terrible abrasions invisible to the eye but delectably to the blood-lust seas, and as it laps at your ankles your amble becomes more aching, the tongue of the tides milking painful steps and as the beastly blackness in all its sullen charm seek to strip the wayward walker of their chance to navigate the earth-havened shores we were never supposed to see, the step becomes more of a fluttering than a footprint in the echoed wakes trailing the traversions of our trepid path, each time becoming more and more crescent in impression until the foot-print like a ghost that clings to attics in old houses where furniture sleeps beneath insipid sheets or the way a canyon consumes the voice shouted in shallow-lung, [end].

The sand erodes the mountains and eats away at the metal cans that surfers bury from the bears and the feet upon which we livenly laud a beach of normal caliber, of normal stature, which with pearly clusters of silken sand caresses our feet like a whisper from wing-beats as a summer lark loftly-looms anear. But not here. The black sand of this sacred shore, both disparaged and divine, will eat the feet of the western traveler, and even the Zulu step tender-footed here. A chalky residue begins to foam on the skin when the sea is kept to far at bay—and though to ones back it is always best to keep the wind, there too will the ocean stray, if one is not mindful to cast a stoic stare to the salty beast that tastes the air, that samples the strangeness of flesh, a carnate delicacy which, to the pallet of this shore is rare. The sands are ashes from the depths of hell of itself, the poetry of an ocean birthed-floor; the sands themselves are granule deposits washed up from the fires of the pits and purgatories of our earth’s very core, where all is molten weeping furrows of festering underworld cascading along the forever inflamed, a river not of old world religious tales where devils feast on stolen souls in a brimstone enclave; no; this real world centric cove is far worse than the feeble mind of purloined zealots and Puritans of more inquisitive times—there is a world beneath our feet which writhes with a perpetual burn and in the moments of belly-woe the beats with bellow with the breathe of real-world hell-fire, and though the obsequious sea will shake with the fevered trembles of fault-lines feathering the ocean floor, from a jutting ascension of rocky crust and reefin-coral the mouth of our world will incite from a livid locus a magma labor from which our treasure lost coast sand is born. This volcano, ill with liquid-earth, will turn old and black, a tar-baby splathering will make nursery on the cold ocean shallows and there will the water reer the sands our children will see. Like a smoker’s lung, carcinogen-curdled with doughy doldrums black and bubbling in the tissue pockets where cavities of air flee the reach of the noxious tar, so too does the lava leech the sea-floor, casting a dismal darkness like depths that aren’t there to even the most shallow-sheltered water of wake-pools and the banks left behind in the evening recede.[end]

The sand is sheltered by the tossing tides, tumbled by the roaring waves, thrashed to stone and shore and ship-deck by the tide-treading tempests of the unseen seas, each becoming more and more the precious stones they are in their true infancy as sand, these kinder-kindles of cast-off mantel evoked to the surface of the rushing, receding waves, and eventually they will cleave from their grounded childhood place, the coral reef beneath, and from there they will dance lock-step in tandem with the tides and each jostling gesticulation of an ocean dancing without regard for some judging eye, these shards of charren core will become salt-shaped and water-polished, like precious stones we mine for trade, these lava beds the ocean bears bringing after decades of disquiet among the jigsaw-pieces of the mantle, each negotiating the hostile heart of the world itself, will burst forth in a birth of someday-sand, and from the pits of pergatude comes forth every human-lifetime or so an unseen devastation muffled by an abandoned stretch of coastal gulf, and in this silence sand sleeps in the shroud of surfs and shallows, few every venturing to their shore. Each ember-dance dislodging of lava will churn with the turmoils of the tides, lost to moon-lust and fitfully provoked by the lunar pull, livid or lulled with her. Each piece will be sparkle-shone with moon glow and strange treasures of the sea, giving it a captive rarity admirers will not be able to place though will readily be able to see. They will become finer and finer, smaller and smaller, and each time they will be more weightlessly suspended in the throes of tsunami-saunters and sickly storms, weathered still by the winter winds and wake-pool wash-outs they will be polished to dagger-like dust until they are swift and smooth like the breeze itself, light and breathable just enough to scratch the lungs; in night-terror telling of the coast, surfers sleep through the high-winds of summer storms safely beached on a hillside embankment, only to have the warm-gulf gales sift the finest grains of sand through the air, and the cherub breath of summer sleep befalls the surfers for the final time, black breathe in a last listless tuft of sea-polished cooled and powdered lava core, their lungs seeped with the cancerous tar of intrepid wind-whirled sand, the embankment area veiled in unnatural nightfall darkness, a black like cooled lava from the earthen-heart at times of illness, the frigid frost left in place of ashes when it is the fire of our planet that stretches silt and soot across the forsaken west coast shore. A fear of black air is always there, but never has it robbed me of the romance inherent to the black sand beaches of this treasured god-havened shore, absconded from the road builders and realistate developers by the centric flames of hell-fire from our liquid core and by the incited trill of trembling exchange that the sky encourages between the warm tropic winds and the cool Arctic fronts, causing even the heavens to seem at hand in the taking back of what humans never deserved: the lost coast, a place beyond us and beside us, a place that rightfully kills us

when the earth is awake and when heaven and justice—not this and mercy—are in accord. [end]

like the air that ate out the eyes of school boys road-side of the dust bowl sand-swells that came in swarms more than storms, like locust in biblical lore. until to the beach itself they are sorn. [end].

From the ocean void rumbles a pit-trebble sound as the waves awash the newest polished stones. Smaller and smaller they become precious still, but always will they hurt us slightly, and never will they lose their shadow-cast pour which all things retain from the womb of which they came, the blackness of heat never meant to dull or cool will always blazen these sand-stone pieces with the fiendish fellowing glow of the underworld hidden beneath the ocean floor, which, like a seawater-blanket, covers the unsightly innards of our otherwise gutted world. The glow of the deepest fire pits clings to the shine of each grain of sand and every sauntering stone, always vaguely there, like the glimmer of a vacant gaze, as with a pair of eyes that meet your own in an unfriendly stumbling of your sight across a crowded saloon, those old-west eyes old trivialized in bad movies now days, the ones black as cultured soil, or smithered steel or more so, as in the cold blank stare of your own eyes into the empty blackness of those belonging to a body wherein the soul no longer resides, a black eerie presence that can only be the presence of nothing at all, of real void, of black sand on forsaken beaches and boy who will never see again; of the old west and it’s warriors, roughed up and whiskey-wise, staring back into the face of their conquest, into vacant black Indian eyes... [end]

The sand is really where the soul of the lost coast lies, the dirt underbelly of a world-rocked wasteland too beautiful not to compulsively describe, and each little grain of sand, every last piece, is a precious, precious stone, the diamonds of the earth, the coveted of the sky, each spec of hushed liquid earth is the lava tears of all that is black and beautiful. A mournful countenance does this hue lend the stretch of shore, and in this sack cloth does it spread ashes where there was but sand before, and the black ashy arch of hostile forests and mountainside shelter the last of poetry in nature, and it is all from the sand, I’m sure. The coast is lost in doleful isolation, only the bears and redwood beasts to groom and rouse the slumber-seaside, the staggering solitude of the sand draped in sandy self-slashed robes, that anemic pasty gray replacing the distant visible curl of cove, the vibrant blackness of the death-dark sand towards the fore withering with distance and mountain fog til it seem sickly at first sight, cast in that particular flesh-hue of grayish blue that we absently associate with illness and impoverishment, with infant jaundice, with the long since dead, with those who have died by the most gruesome means—by suffication, by the sea, by sickness and starvation and disease. The coast looks increasingly pale as it creeps into the distant king’s range shoulder, and just before it disappears, it dons a last look at the sand, still slightly gray with that color of shiva shorn attire, the coast itself takes on a soul. This is that upon which the few who tread the lost coast trails trepidly tread, upon a raw-jewel harvest where the crops of crimson swells hushed the heated embers of upturned molten-earth that weeped from the world restless below. [end].

First of all, yes--clearly the first problem we can see is that when there is no spellcheck to keep me shackled to sanity and the OED, I go on a word-invention feild-day, and start making up words (or at least altering them until they are but my own soulless bastardizations) just to suite my alliterative needs or beat-of-verse or whimsical fancy. Shakespeare did this often, and from his made up words we get some of the most beautiful in our language today--I believe the word "tempest" meaning "storm" is one of those words, and also one of my favorites. But, needless to say, I hardly fancy myself a Shakespeare -- ha, laughable even to type -- for I am less than dirt that sits atop his grave today. But that is, I suppose, still something.

Notice all the times I typed [end]? I didn't even get passed the first line before I was off topic. Had the topic been about the water, I could have written a novel on sand without trouble, but wouldn't have been able to say a word about the water. What my boyfriend and I concluded is that I place entirely too much importance on a single sentence, struck by some subconcious fear that any given sentence could be my last, or the only one ever read, and therefore each must be able to to bear the weight of the entire subject matter, and each much fully represent the best of my skill, style, voice and ability. This is why I can never write simply "I was born on October 6th, 1985, in Tyler Texas" without deviating from the topic at hand to go on a tangent about the red dust of the town where I was born. The pressure of worrying that any given sentence may have to represent me fully as a writer, I feel such responsibility to the words I love, it's crippling.

Also, notice how LONG I was able to go on and on and on about SAND (veering sometimes from the point, but mostly, sand.) I didn't even run out of words, my boyfriend just said, finally, "ok, that's enough, this is ridiculous. What could you even be saying?" I have no idea.

Keep in mind that the above musing on sand is not meant to be representative of my best work--it was free writing, writing in my most raw state, without spell check or grammar check, without page count or concern for punctuation, paragraph, or formal structure. It's not a poem, not an essay--a musing is all I can think to call it...and that's a bit of a euphamism.

It's rough and raw and vaguely awful, like seeing a picture of myself when I was thirteen and still awkward and unsightly--recognizing my face in the pictures from that time, but only in a vague, somewhat disgusted sort of disconnected way.

If the sand-musing is me at my very worse, me with no holds-barred, me where my censor and even my spell check is utterly silenced--well, there you have it then--I stand naked in my craft before the world; thank god no one's reading. If someone is reading, thank god you find me amusing enough to have read thus far. Forgive my fledgling prose.

Alas, I know not what the anwser is, what medicine or magic spell or parlor trick could possibly hold the cure to my writting's delay, and I fear it is dying under the burden of my verbosity.

If only I could do this place real justice, rather than just exhausting the topic of sand...

xoxo

More tangents soon to come--they're stacking up qucikly as I pretend I'm trying to write my autobiography. Who's ever heard of a memoirist who can't write their own autobiography? If only I was alotted 5,000 words...maybe then....