"Why, I wonder, has it taken so very many words to report that no words visited me today?"

What if, I wondered as I slinked down into my writer's chair this morning, I find nothing to write about today? I peeked back through the last three years of material I'd written on this date and found it good. I scrolled back through the prior couple of weeks' stuff and stumbled away impressed (if I do say so myself), but what if this morning brought the day when I found nothing remaining worth saying anything about? What if? I've seemingly invested so much of what I've grown to believe represents me being here that I fear a vacuum might make me disappear. It would be as if my recurrent delusions of invisibility had come to fruition, that my walking could no longer produce footprints, as if the shrubbery no longer whispered with my passage. I wouldn't even be a ghostwriter then, perhaps not even a ghost.

I received in my email this morning a request to connect with a fellow on LinkedIn. I receive a few of these each week, though the crude interface LinkedIn provides seems impenetrable. I clicked on the link imbedded in the email message—figuring why not?—and was routed to a LinkedIn page not for solidifying any connection, but for feeding all my contacts to LinkedIn. That page offered no option for proceeding without first surrendering my privacy, so I quickly closed down that tab and responded to the guy via regular old email. He said that he possessed tips on how one might become a ghostwriter. I responded that I was not even sure if I qualified as a ghost this morning. I've never been a ghostwriter, and while the prospect hardly seems attractive, I thought I might get some entertainment out of batting around that toy mouse. I doubt that he'll respond, with me having once again proven myself incapable of penetrating LinkedIn's deep dark access secret. I never understood what LinkedIn was created to do other than deny access to itself. Today, I thought, might be the day when I become my very own, self-contained LinkedIn, denying access to my own self. No app required.

I've written about so much of my life, so many of my perceptions, that I feel as though I might have finally filled the folio. My readers have already seen snapshots of every square inch of me, most of which hardly seemed extraordinary when I posted them. For a time, I used my writing to introduce what I imagined might seem unique ways to parse a life experience, though uniqueness itself forcefully resists description. I remain uncertain whether any of my earlier attempts succeeded beyond a narrow audience of people already conditioned to understand. I guess it's a damned good thing that I never fancied myself an evangelist. I discovered some time ago that I might be better off avoiding any sort of selling activity, that I should just give stuff away rather than wait for any slumbering market to awaken and take notice.

The market seems a slimy presence. It holds no compunction to starving out anyone, especially any aspiring artist, but only if said artist aspired to whatever rewards a market might provide, like a paycheck. Once the budding artist ceases aspiring, it seems to me that only then might s/he start being an artist. Aspirations stand squarely between dream and realization, when just doing, simply engaging, might more than suffice to fully inhabit the dream. Maybe the market dangles broader recognition, "discovery", as the alluring rubber worm. Art might insist upon every wanna-be to simply be first, and perhaps last and always. Markets are dumb and capricious, never wise or nurturing. Any artist could be better off living as might a beast of any everyday field rather than aspiring for the tap of some market's imaginary magic wand.

The day will come when even demonstrated mastery produces nothing, with no promise of any early secession of hostilities. The well ran dry. The larder's empty. The idea factory's rusted and abandoned, producing no more. What then? Some mornings it might well seem as though the long road to utter irrelevance has finally reached its inevitable destination. One arrives there to find that there is no there there, and that there probably never was a there there, anyway. Where had I imagined I was heading when I first headed out in this direction? Fame? Fortune? Ignominy? Who remembers now? Somehow, I seem to have nothing left to describe, nothing left to even try to hide behind. I might have written my last word. Why, I wonder, has it taken so very many words to report that no words visited me today?

©2019 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #GlancingKnow, #PureSchmaltz