Some Thoughts at Nighttime

There is something profoundly lonely about late-night writing. It doesn't worry about style, hardly bothers with spelling and punctuation, though it can't shake the old habits of meter and verse as readily as it can throw off later conventions. It's like peeling back the layer of skin to see the muscles and bones and veins, the sounds of the words beneath. Beneath, I guess, means deeper than a quotidian reading. It means writing when you don't know how the words will turn out. It's like sleeptalking--you're aware you're doing it, but you have no control over it.

Life is funny, because it's like writing. The same feeling of beneath-ness follows it like a shadow. I have incomplete information on which to base my future. Do I dare disturb the universe? It's so much bigger and more powerful than me, and living with that awe is more comfortable than accepting the power beneath me, suppressed by the ordinariness of everyday living. The power to choose. Choose a graduate program, choose where to live, how many kids to have, what to eat, when to adopt a dog. Beneath the fog of choice am I. I feel at loose ends, like all the drafts of unfinished novels lying asleep in my notebooks until it's time to wake up.

Which story will I awaken? Which words will have the power of life and death over my future? I want to name this blog "According To" not because I think I'm the center of the universe. In fact, I hope I'm not! I'm just a collection of atoms that happens to be here, right now, thinking about where my life is going to take me.

"According to" comes from two Latin words which mean "to the heart." This later comes to connote harmony and consistency within one's self or a group of others, but the adverb according means "in proportion or relation to." This is the world as told through my lexicon, my limited experience, and my biased observations. I will not here attempt objectivity, but I will attempt candor. I will not attain structure, but I may attain clarity. I might even write something worth reading, even if it's only for myself.