Patchwork entry

Fair to partly cloudy afternoon, early May, in the palm of the mitten, pre-apocalypse, and I was thinking, as is oft my wont, is doing the right thing always the moral thing? No, the thought wasn’t provoked and it wasn’t even probed, I just thought what a good prompt it would make for flash Friday. I’m the two of you reading this have an answer, like a first impression answer. But do you have a fiction?

Fiction is how we play with ideas or, I suppose, how some people make a living. Most of the folks making a good living aren’t playing, there is no higher purpose, just crank out the shit people will pay to read, even denigrate as they are getting back copper for their twenty. Yes, play is a higher purpose. It’s how we learn, it’s how most mammals learn. As cute as it is to watch Scotty, your Yorkshire Terrier puppy, bite his tug and shake it, or tug at it with you holding the other end, that’s how a dog hunts. The first year of public school here in the states, has bright colored puzzles, climbing toys in the playground, is centered around play. Every grade in elementary school gets a recess, time to play outdoors.

Fiction is how we play with ideas. The format is a bit limited, you have to put the ideas in the boundaries of a story, and there are some inescapable limits, but only if you want it to be readable. We all have our private thoughts. I do best when I put them to paper. Hmmm, that didn’t come out quite right. When I was younger I needed to clear my head often and writing it down made it seem like the ideas were secure and I could move on to the next without an overpopulation problem in the resource poor real estate of my head. Now I just straight up forget shit. I find, sometimes, when I write it down it’s something different than I thought it was. Sometimes I write it down with the express intent of it being different than I thought it was. I’m not saying this too well; it’s not fiction.

When you are writing nonfiction, you are writing about what happened, even if it’s predictive of events that haven’t occurred yet, like the effect of global warming on, say, 2030, you are writing what you’ve already thought about, maybe spent years studying. Fiction is unborn until you take paws to keyboard, quill in hand, a gnawed-up pencil to fat journal paper. Sure, you have an idea, but you’re not married to it until it’s committed to paper.

Why would I come up with flash prompts? Why am I not just writing the damn thing? I miss the interactive part of journaling. I’m not writing the damn thing because I don’t feel like it. Much as I love y’all, we are strangers typing in a vacuum. When we do it together we’re even stranger. I like it strange. My answer to the prompt would have to be no, the right thing isn’t always the moral thing. That’d be playing with fiction. Yes, has less wiggle room to play in. Of course, pulling off something interesting from yes is more of a challenge. I’m sticking with I don’t feel like it.

Fuck me running, now it’s a gray Saturday. You don’t have to fuck me running because it’s Saturday, I just lost two days to a back spasm that seems to feel it has squatter’s rights. Fuck me running is rhetorical like, say, I gotta freshen up like a racehorse or I gotta see a dog about the Tsar. I’m not even sure how that’d work, but I’ll entertain any proposals.

I’m not sure what all is in the paragraphs above, I vaguely remember typing them in the long ago of two days back. I think I called whatever day it was pre-apocalypse, on a personal level the apocalypse was nipping at it’s heels, on a global level I think it’s business as usual or the news that the planet is having a back spasm hasn’t reached here yet.

I guess I’m fortunate to have a buttload of painkillers and pain killer adjuncts. It’s palliative, not curative, sort of like breakfast or Television only more effective and less enduring. Whether it’s just this sentence or more, I’m fixing to post this poxy bastard before it chews a hole in my computer screen.

I love my monitor, not in a romantic way, though, I think that’s the next technology. It’s 32 inches of curvy beauty. It curves at the edges. Makes watching video, um, more videoier. Near the end of last year, I replaced the house television with a larger version of this monitor. I got the 4k smart television one. I’m not a fan of 4k. It’s too precise. Instead of making things look realer — no, wait, it does make things look realer, to realer. I’m not sure how to explain it in a sensory way, but it’s like you can’t ignore that things were done in a studio, done with CGI, done with a green screen. No matter how well a movie or TV show is edited, 4k makes it a lot harder to suspend your disbelief. You can almost see the makeup on the actors faces. In any case I don’t want a poxy bastard of an entry chewing my monitor.

Worse thing about a back spam is … well, pain, really. Next to that is that there’s no way to get comfortable. The first decade that I got those things the advice I was given and liked was to stay in bed and something about plenty of fluids. The following decade I discovered Moving around every hour or so was better. Not getting up from bed, going to the bathroom on account of the plenty of fluids, and going back to bed again. Getting out of bed, walking as much as I can handle and then sitting in a chair. Just don’t leave your back in any one position for too long. So, I sitting here typing. Or I was. Good luck to y’all, kith and kin, and be nice to the other inmates, when the revolution comes you’ll need them.