a pen

sometimes, i don’t write for fear of writing down everything i know…

sometimes, i just. don’t. write.

(valerie june)

why are things so different than they used to be? before cell phones and the internet, i wrote profusely. in diaries. notebooks. journals with gold-leafed edges. on light greenish-blue or gray or black lines. on paper and page after page after page after. page. i drew pictures. i sat in front of mirrors and sketched myself. my hair. my afro, my glasses, my breasts, my legs and eyes and pen and journal. and then, a computer came. to my home. outside of the school’s lab. and i wrote essays. and artist statements. and pecked email after email, fostering relationships with virtual strangers, online buddies, and real-time confidantes alike. telling them all i brimmed with on a day to day, laughter and pain and joke and aside; names, places, situations, coming of age moments, and even lust. i don’t think i googled back then. but i would lie on the floor or sit on the toilet, in the tub, in the car, and i’d also write in a journal. page after page after page after page. thought after thought. idea, plan, summary, and recaps. i told myself the same things twice. three times. then i did it. i said, or i wrote, i would leave him, or buy this, or imagine that, and i loved her and hated this, and wanted that. i loved good pens, but wrote with whatever was available. i wrote it in all caps, i wrote it while i was drunk, i wrote in different fonts, and then i wrote some more.

now, however, i wake up. and i check for my world on the internet.

i look out these huge windows and then back into my small screen with the bigger worldview and i check to see what this world is up to. i keep my thoughts to myself because it takes so long to find out everything that is going on out there, and then, to try to put it down. but once in a while, i have to put it here. i have to deal with the the fact that between checking the internet and observing the people i live with, there’s hardly any time for me to write, as i once did, in paper journals. i feel bad. there are chunks of my life that have not been documented. whole years now, i’m guessing, if you’d patch together the holes. how important is what was said before? what has already been written? how accurate is it even? maybe that doesn’t matter. i am but one more woman with one more perspective on this world. consumed with my own thoughts of the way this life ought to be. my unfolding of her who is me.

on the telephone, or should i say, cell phone, earlier, i described my daughter’s father’s parenting skills to my cousin, who concluded, “oh, he over there running with scissors, huh?”

“!,” i exclaimed. that’s EXACTLY what is happening.

so in addition to:

* global warming
* a national economic crisis
* being 3 years post-mfa and unemployed
* living with a man
* parenting a tween without child support
* and eddie long (who is rocking the nation’s notion of the black (mega-)church),

i have a co-parent who’s parenting style most closely resembles a certain atmosphere which was portrayed in augusten burroughs’ premiere novel, running with scissors. ain’t life grand? the muthafucka is crazy. that’s the best way i can put it. and currently, i’m brimming with thought about it. thought which could fill page after page after page in any given diary. but today, i’ll settle for world-watching, a little blogging, and filling out papers to get us back in court. it feels good to hold a pen again.