This world wasn't meant for us both

Haven't had much blogger material lately. Friendster seems to be chewing up an inordinate amount of my farting around time.

I was really uninspired today to write my column. I'd gotten to thinking so much about everything I want to do next week—I've got around 10+ errands planned—that I couldn't sit down and tackle the most pressing issue. My brain refused to focus until I'd made a to-do list.

Writing is really strange like that. Things that often rattled in my head for days a few years ago can now be expunged by simply committing them to paper. I slapped that list of shit down and immediately started up on the rough draft that had eluded me for the past week. I wish I'd taken an interest in writing at an early age instead of coming to it so late. I remember the few things I wrote in high school that weren't for a class were some humor stuff for a friend's project and an essay about my uncle that the lit mag took my junior year. I still can't remember what prompted to me to write about him; well, no, what I mean is that I remember the incident—Bebo walking through the living room while obviously strung out on some narcotic—and now I realize there was the first stirring of my inclination use paper as part of this exorcising reflex.

Come to think of it, that's pretty much how all my artistic impulses are. Photography and writing for me are responsive, reflexive endeavors. I want to others to see what I saw, in the manner that I saw it, and taking the same beauty/meaning/horror/disappointment/etc. that I took from those few moments. My best writing and my best photography are guided by the ol' gut, and that goes a long way to explain why I need photographic subjects that I can react to, which usually involves temporary states of things—think: a flower blooming—that inspire revelations in the way I see them, and why my best writing is usually descriptive, a combination of observation and interpretation. It also explains why ficiton befuddles me.

Perhaps the weirdest, most frustrating, and neatest thing about writing is its unpredictability. Now, I'm not the first to say this, but it's true: whatever I set out to write is never what I end up writing. And in the rare instances that I produce something nearly identical to what I first conceived, it is inevitably lacking. Here are some things that crossed my mind to write about at some point while I was sitting in front of my computer:

1. Because of a profusion of posts about Bush and the Daily Texan, my blogspot adds at the top have talked a lot about cowboys and politics. Props to B for pointing out that those things are randomly generated by key words on one's page.
2. A reproduction of an email I sent to my friend Lynnette in South Africa in which I discuss at length the sum of my romantic frustrations. Abandoned because most of you have heard it all before, and I didn't want to subject you to another tangent of the Why Matty Can't Find a Serious Relationship thread.
2a. How nice it would be to actually get excited about a girl again.
3. All the shit that I manage to lose. Current examples: a credit card bill and the receipt to a book that I need to return because some jackass discreetly cut out (with a knife, I think) a 30-page Carlos Fuentes essay.
4. How much ass Borges's short stories kick.
5. Why the fuck are so many hot girls on Friendster?
6. A list of all the hot girls across this great nation I've bookmarked on Friendster.
7. What it's like having a roni.

Instead you got this. Who knows why.

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I really like a lot of my Meanest Capacity pictures. I miss their shows already.