Hoarding

Ideas and images fill my head regularly.

When I try to record them with words, I am usually unable to capture them with an accurate reflection of what they were doing in my head. I don't know why this is the case. But somewhere after jotting down the first words, the entire piece takes a turn into a realm that either trivializes what I was thinking or goes far afield from original intent.

Some of the threads I have followed have led to decent replacement pieces from the original. More likely, though, they become bland or silly and not worth mentioning in any form or forum. Yet, I still do, because they are all I have at the moment, and the readers of such don't necessarily realize what has happened from my perspective.

It seems that I have three major subjects about which I keep writing.

These are the three subjects with their subsets:

• Time (aging, the past, changes which occur with the passage of time)

• Relationships (love, sex, my wife, ex-girlfriends, good and bad aspects of relationships)

• Nature/Environment (the wind, seasons and the changing thereof, city environments, different locales, ie woods, ocean, mountains, etc.)

Most of these are to be found in poems. Some of my blog entries deal frequently with the first in the list. Short stories are a bit more difficult to categorize, though you can find elements of these subjects as well.

I guess that in the end there's only one thing I can take from all this. I have been writing first and foremost for myself since I started. Unlike commercial writers who produce for a broader audience with the expectation of making money (which wouldn't have bothered me in the least had it happened to me), my audience the entire time was one person.

I don't think of this as narcissism in the literal definition of the word, but maybe it colors the efforts. The greater motivator, I think, is fear. Fear that if I don't record these things, I will somehow lose them in the swirling mists of time. Even at the age of 51, I find my memory has become unreliable and more than a bit fuzzy.

But what is the value of these memories that has caused me to spend so much time composing the written items? It's not a matter of learning from the past. It's not a matter of recording great events with historical worth. And I think that in my last days on earth, I won't be trying to recall going fishing or riding a bicycle or playing a pickup game of baseball.

Yet, I'm compelled to keep doing it. Maybe some day, a valid reason will present itself.

Until then, I'll have to use the George Mallory reason.

Because it's there.