Death

I think blogging might be killing my writing.

I was just driving through the city after dropping The Dreaded... oh fuck it. This blog's hardly anonymous anymore. I dropped Ann off at The Opera House and was driving back through the city thinking about how I've had this thing lately about appreciating every day. Every moment of every day. I want good stuff. Laughter, general happiness. Money would be fine, but fuck it, real happiness, you make that for free. Every moment really is precious because it really could be your last.

Lilly Tomlin was interviewed recently by Andrew Denton. She is a total babe in every sense of the word. Andrew asked her something along the lines of what she's learned as she's grown older, and she said something like, "You realise that life is more finite than it was."

Our lives have always been finite. There is a time and a place. We will cease to exist. But Lilly was right - I think as you get older and have the odd close call, you start to feel like you're living on borrowed time. You just get more intolerant of the shit that small minds throw at you. You get more selective with the friends you want around you. You try to make sure they're good people, and you try to return some goodness to them. You lose your way of course and you do clumsy things and make mistakes, but I think as you get older you focus a little more on not doing these things.

That line by Chuck Palahniuk - "This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time." That's it in a nutshell. It hits you occasionally when you're young, but you brush it aside because there's life to be lived. Why dwell on the fact that we're going to cease to be? It's how it has to be, but the closer the time comes, the more you realise there's real stuff you have to squeeze out of every day, out of every precious moment.

This is what I was thinking about after dropping Ann off at work. Sunny day in a shiny city. People out in their summer gear. There's a fountain I drive past in Hyde Park, Theseus slaying the Minotaur, turtles around the edge spouting water. I saw a derelict almost drown there once, one of those moments everyone who was there has probably forgotten about, but it stayed with me and I used it in a story. It was a moment that mean't something to me. Maybe it was one of those moments when the truth of life stared me straight in the eye. I stared back and remembered it, dressed it up and put it in a story. That's what I used to do. I'd see something, have a thought, make a story.

And now I'm sitting here and simply putting these unadorned thoughts down instead of making a story out of them.

This is why I think blogging is killing my writing.