Cheese, Cell Phones, Writing, Existential Crisis.

Now I understand that this is a blog, so everything I am about to say will be absolutely stupid given that context, but let’s face it, if you’re reading this blog at all it is probably just because you’re bored at work, so what do you care?

I was just considering whether or not I could somehow write a haiku about how quickly my cell phone battery dies and how I have to charge it all the time and does everybody have this problem? When it occurred to me – in a rare moment of clarity – that the reason there are no great lyric poems already dealing with this subject is because it is completely lame.

I know that my personal sensibilities bend toward the absurd, so I think that a poem about cell phone battery life sounds just peachy keen, but not everyone feels this way. That’s cool. But regardless of the exact nature of the bland subject matter, I have got to imagine that there have always been people mining bland subject matter for something, right? I mean, not every piece of writing can be about adjusting your understanding of the universe or exploring man’s relationship with god or what have you. Honestly, I feel that not every piece of writing should be.

I remember coming across a quote in high school, sadly I can’t remember who said it. The quote was: “History’s great philosophers have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”

I remember thinking that it was funny, but I guess it is also dead on; who wants to ponder cheese?

But you know what? I like cheese.

But lately I have started to fear that I spend too much time pondering the cheese. I try to tell myself that I’m a writer, so my job is to make the cheese interesting (is this cheese metaphor getting to be too much?).

I guess that what I am wrestling with is: what I should be doing with my time and with my writing? I have a novel that I have been working on for ages, but I am lucky if I actually work on it more than once a week. However I try to always be writing something at least every single day, hence the proliferation over the past year or so of my crappy poetry. I can tell myself, “Hey, at least I am generating something.” And not for nothing, but it is hard to generate content! If you write or if you have a blog then you already know this.

And that’s the interesting part, EVERYBODY has a blog. Or at least a Tumbler or a Twitter account. And so that makes me wonder – not just about me, but about all of us – are we all just pondering the cheese? I am guilty of it. The quick-fix satisfaction of dashing off a dozen shitty poems and then posting them on the internet is so much easier and instant than sitting down every day for five years and working on a massive, scary novel.

This is the part where I tend to forget that not everybody is me. So I ask you, am I the only one slacking off creatively? Or are we all doing it? Are you also working on a poem about your cell phone’s battery life instead of writing that novel you want to write? Are we all passing over the bigger, more important work and replacing it with quick-fix poetry and dressing it up like we are actually pondering the mundane-ity of existence? Is our whole culture doing this?

Anyone who lives in - or has ever visited – the greater Los Angeles area and gotten stuck in traffic on the 405 or the 101 has physically experienced the tragic result of this phenomenon. The freeway infrastructure of LA has been maxed out for more than two decades and it is because the people who were in charge never knuckled down to do the big, grand, important work. I imagine that there were entire offices filled with politicians and civil engineers and instead of working up solutions to impending problems, they just sat around exchanging poetry about cheese and cell phones. And is that all we really do now? I feel like that’s all that I have been doing.

All that being said, I am probably still going to write that poem about the life and times of my cell phone battery, but maybe I will also sit down and do some real writing. That is the plan anyway. Let’s see how it goes.

I want to apologize if this post is needlessly long and ramble-y, but one of the nice things about having a blog no one reads is that I get to use it to work out thoughts. It also means that I get to post whatever the hell I feel like, such as this photo of the ridiculously gorgeous Alison Sudol of Fine Frenzy fame.



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