One thing I’ll say about the book: man, this is work.
The blog itself is almost never work. If what I’m writing feels like work, I simply stop writing, walk away from the computer, and play some DVD extras (or, lately, play a month worth of “WWE Smackdown: Here Comes The Pain”, and no, I’m not bitter that I was a Tag Team Champion for 3 months and yet had no Wrestlemania match in Season Mode, but thanks for asking). Point is, any and all labor here is a labor of love at worst, and a lot of fun at best.
This book, though…it’s been something like three weeks of my life, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but given everything else that’s been going on in my life, has felt like an extremely long 21-day period. And although I had a great team of volunteer editors helping whip the sections into shape, I still kept one section completely and utterly to myself---the “personal” section that I’ve dubbed “Lithium Sunset”, named after a song by Sting.
“Lithium” is roughly 58,000 of the more intense words I’ve written on this site over the past year. They largely trace the end of my relationship with Jenny through the dissolution of my parents’ marriage, with every question, concern, aborted attempt at happiness, and stubborn clinging to hope. And in editing these sections, I had to two things I hate more than just about anything: reread my own work and confront the demons I’d sought to conquer during the initial literary purgations.
While at Friday’s a few weekends ago, I was pouring some woes upon my co-worker Julie, who’s this lovely, no-nonsense coworker of mine that’s become my drinking buddy. And after a ten-minute rant, she finally held up her hand and said, “You know, you think too much.” Which is, of course, entirely true. For her, my over-obsessive ruminations over things both important and unimportant simply doesn’t compute with her more straightforward approach to matters. She cuts through the clutter nicely, whereas I sometimes will stop off at the local store to buy clutter to strew neck-high in my path.
After all, though, this 100,000+ word compendium to the blog only has about one third of the total writing I’d done over the last calendar year, so yes, clearly I not only think but articulate far too much. What’s interesting to me, at least, reading over “Lithium” is that my incessant verbosity towards topics comes from the fact that I often type or speak as I am formulating my thoughts, and as such, succinctness kinda gets left by the wayside.
Same thing when talking with Julie, or anybody else, if the topic either interests or confounds me. I work through it, bit by bit, word by word, but usually without a break between thought and word. So yea, I’ll say in 100 words that which could be said in 30, or even 13, but that’s just the way I do it. I play the guitar on the MTV. See? Pop culture reference popped in the middle. I thought it; I typed it. Just the way it goes.
“Lithium” is full of these types of probes---over a word, a relationship, a movie, a mental state. These things confuse and agitate and excite often all at one. So when something comes along that tickles my fancy, piques my interest, or shakes my moneymaker, I sit down and type it out. Much cheaper than getting on the phone, especially before my night-time minutes kick in. And I’ve learned something in reading this “Lithium” probes:
I’m in a lot of ways no better off than I was 12 months ago.
It’s funny---yes, I’m better, in that asking the questions and seeking the answers can never be a bad thing, unless you ask “What was in that sandwich?” and the answer has the word “muskrat” somewhere in it. Other than that, questioning is by and large a good and noble endeavor. It’s just that the same questions filled the essays, over and over again. Never in quite the same way, but always in a similar vein. Which is great, in that it gives this section a great deal of continuity, but it also, in my opinion, yields a lot of stop-starts. It doesn’t make for the cleanest narrative.
And this, in the end, I’ve decided is quite the excellent thing.
For a while I thought I’d write a post-script for the book. You know, wrap it all up, give some sage last words, offer some spirited invocation of better times to come…but in the end, I decided against this idea. To do so would have been doing a disservice to the honest, if not always successful, proving that marks the rest of this section. Removing those entries in which I take a step back, or reformulate the same question I thought I’d answered two months before, likewise would be pointless and a whitewashing of the messiness of my life.
After all, nothing in the book was originally written as a good ol-fashioned narrative, and the only thing truly making “Lithium” have any narrative is the chronological order of the postings. So I got to reread every insecurity, unanswered question, fit of rage, beam of optimism, and crushing setback of the past year of my life precisely at the worst time I could have done so. Writing the new “Rambling” columns on Fridays is as much of a break for myself, I imagine, as you few dedicated readers who, for reasons I’ll never quite get but deeply appreciate, keep coming back again and again. I mean, reading “Lithium” in a way has stunted my own writing impulses, because it’s so much work.
And we’re back to that word again: work. Work to read, and now work to write. Can I really go on probing these same questions throughout 2004? Would I even want to? Hard to say. Probably not, is my guestimation on that query. Not because I fear you wouldn’t want to read it as much as I wouldn’t want to write it. “New year, new rules.” It’s what I wrote down on New Year’s Eve 2002, and it’s equally applicable here and now. I’ve gone as far as I can with the way I currently express myself, and it’s time for a change.
The book marks the end of that particular phase, I think. It might be the subconscious reason I started to compile it in the first place. Having a tangible tome of a year’s work might be a final period on that seemingly interminable sentence. Maybe not. Might be a fool’s hope. In any case, I’ll still have a nicely bound snapshot of a year in the (online) life. I’ve reread most of what I experienced over those months, with thoughts and emotions long-forgotten coming to the surface with a speed that scared me.
Good to remember, though. Hard to believe I had forgotten in the first place. Maybe a willful neglect? Not for me to say at this point. It’s all there, it’s undeniably me, and it’s undeniably mine. Maybe not such a bad way to start the year off, in the end.
That’s work worth doing.