The trouble with eschewing is that there’s no way to know when to stop.
I posted on Tuesday. On Wednesday I eschewed.
I continued eschewing on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
Now it’s Sunday, a half-hour before I should retire. Thirty minutes isn’t enough time to finish this. I may eschew by necessity.
And then what?
Tomorrow an’ tomorrow an’ tomorrow.
How slow dey movink! Almost cripps!
Soch a pity de pace!
Forgive me. I’ve been wanting to quote Hyman Kaplan for years.
But you get my drift. What if eschewing does not end?
More than once this week, I pulled up the New Post screen and began to write.
But you know how that works.
Three- or four hundred words in, you stop and skim over what you’ve done. You realize it stinks.
You forget that everything you write starts out the same way–stinky–and that if you persevere, cut it by about half, rewrite what’s left, you can get the reeking to cease, mostly.
At least that’s the way it works for me.
But it works that way, obviously, only when I’m in practice.
Go without writing for several days, and what happens? The connection between the brain and the hand weakens. The personal lexicon diffuses. Words spring loose, leak in to the spinal fluid, slog through the lymphatic system, and end up stuck somewhere near the tip of the tongue.
And what appears on the screen is just “‘a tale told by idjots, dat’s all, full of fonny sonds an’ phooey!'”
At least that’s the way it works for me.
Sad, isn’t it?
More than once this week, I scrapped what I’d written. That cannot continue.
If I’m going to blog, I must set aside public opinion and the slings and arrows of outrageous critics, and, as my husband would say, put my nose to the brimstone, and blog.
I’ll stop now before this gets any worse.
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Quotations from Julius Scissor (or, possibly, from Macbeth) are taken from “Mr. Kaplan and Shakespeare,” in The Education of Hyman Kaplan, by Leo Rosten.
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Image of the tongue: This faithful reproduction of a lithograph plate from Gray’s Anatomy, a two-dimensional work of art, is not copyrightable in the U.S. as per Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.; the same is also true in many other countries, including Germany. Unless stated otherwise, it is from the 20th U.S. edition of Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body, originally published in 1918 and therefore lapsed into the public domain.
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I have been fiddling with the preceding 420 words for the past 2.5 hours. That includes the 30 minutes I gave myself to write it. Lesson: Nocturnal individuals should leave blogging to the daytimers.
Kathy Waller 