Anthologies of Awesome

The world as a dynamic resting place of dead life is not entirely accurate. The earth has very, very little life bearing volume. The lithosphere, just the very top sheen of floating, congealed mantle, has a layer of life thinner than the sheen of algae in a fish tank by scale.

The rocks we see, the hardened and brittle torn rocks, are not at all the earth. That’s like saying the split and dead ends of your hair constitute your person. They don’t even matter.

And when you live in an area where the visible parts of the earth are exposed to the eye, and where the geological story is such that two miles of the piling on stratigraphic collumn, a sort of hourglass, is plainly within sight, your hanlding of life is a little stunted. Or possibly improved. It is impossible to say.

But I can say that if you come from a place where the rocks are covered by the quickened green things and where the visible earth cycles in days or weeks or months, even years, you’ll have a wholly divorced take on life from what me and the desert people have.

I was talking to my girlfriend about Hemmingway and one of his more homoerotic stories. She believes that he must have at least participated in the actions he writes about to write it that convincingly. I take it differently. A writer who is worth a shit should be able to write convincingly a gay character, a female (assuming you are male) character, a character of another race, or any other person you are not.

And she told me you can only write what you know. And I said something to the effect that writing is only an art when you are not writing what you know.

And for some reason it made me think of Dali and Picasso and the continents rent a’twain. And so forth.

And then I thought of two short stories I wrote that centered on female characters. And I want badly to find them and publish them here or somewhere else and see if I was able to do what I thought I did. If I was able to write a female character into being.

Writing has been so difficult for me, lately. I don’t know why, but it’s been nearly impossible. The last few posts on here I have liked greatly, but they’re sporadic and probably not speaking to anybody the way I think they are. And so it goes, I guess.

Willie Nelson just whined onto my headphones and reminded me of a noble truth I had forgotten.

This is not that truth, but a valid thought:

The Earth is not the rocks we see and is, by any measure, a remarkably different creature than what any person previous to the invention of seismology conceived.
Who would have thought the earth was a drop of (mostly) molten iron
and other heavier metals? No one can write a story of the Earth, but they could write some damn good stories.

So, by that measure, a person could write a damn good story about a female (or whatever is most different from you) character while having absolutely no knowledge of the actual construction or motivation of actual females.