Mental Cleaning Day

In the last couple of days I've started four or five articles. You haven't seen them, and probably won't. 

Well, I do that. Quite a lot of what I write (try to write, anyway) doesn't deserve to see the light of day. Just as well; my stuff reads much better in the dark.

This is my hobby; I never expect to make a dime from this. I don't finish everything I start, and I don't feel guilty about that since no one is paying me to finish anything.

Sometimes what seems like a good idea for an article isn't, and gets abandoned while it's still being written. Yesterday I started a lengthy analyses of why Romney lost, and after spending a couple of hours doing research and more than an hour hammering out a rough draft of the article, I realized that I didn't care all that much why Romney lost just as long as he lost. One fragment of that article:

"Some conservatives are blaming the media for defining the election to Obama's benefit. The media didn't define the election, the candidates did. Or didn't; one of Romney's biggest problems was that once Romney had been identified as the likely Republican nominee, and while Romney himself was still actively fighting for the nomination, the Democrats could focus on Romney before Romney could defend himself."

I am not sure what that means. I hope that I could have made some sense of it in editing...but I just trashed the article; it was long, it was boring, and it was crap. Shit-canned.

Some articles never get much beyond a cool-sounding title, and some ideas die before I get much farther than that. I've got one titled Sometimes I amaze myself... which starts with the sentence: "Sometimes I stand in awe of my powers of foresight. Most of the time, though, I'm just full of crap." True enough as far as it goes...but I have no recollection of what the hell I was going to write next! Election predictions? Literary criticism? Jambalaya recipes? What? Shit-canned.

I've got a couple of election-related articles that I never finished due to trouble doing research (Google ain't what it used to be) and I just got rid of those. Also, a few ideas I roughed out (very rough) for post-election articles got the same treatment; they were divisive and an bit unkind in retrospect, and not worth pursuing. Shit-canned.

And speaking of Google...I had an idea for an article on what a semi-useless mess google has become, how it's far more difficult to do research than it used to be, how it's good for finding stuff to buy but a poor research tool, but everything worth saying I just said in one sentence so the article is a bit superfluous. Shit-canned.

I've got a long article on my mother, similar to the one that I recently (finally) published about my brother. Like the article on Mark, the one on Mom is something I occasionally open when I'm in need of a bit of catharsis. I expand it, edit it, format it, proofread it, and don't publish it. Nor am I getting any closer to publishing it; the subject matter is still too raw and painful for me to share. But I'm keeping that one.

Today, after failing to finish the crappy article I was writing, I decided to trash most of the trash I had cluttering up my Google account. (Would that I could clean my house so easily!) In the end, all I had to say today is that I had nothing to say. But I said it anyway...and you still read it. Apparently nothing really does have a value beyond nothing. I should have listened to Jerry Seinfeld.

The Blues Viking

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.