The Scribbler

The Scribbler is a curious creature: so in love with jotting something down, in love with a good way of putting something, in love with the word and how it fluidly carries its textual bulk down a page, in love with the next line and almost unaware of the line just written. He has been wondering how to remain productive, for The Scribbler is naturally prone to cycles of dryness and cycles of unrecordable overabundance. The Scribbler is not special: his attention span is average at best, for sure beset by the ever-present shiny things and TV shows and musical phrases floating around in the vicinity. So he graviatates to peotry, or sometimes the short story. Sometimes he scribbles down longer-term projects, but they fizzle out unless they are collections of bite-size thought fragments. Thematic unity eludes him, so he resorts to making underhaanded connections between these pieces of text, much like a hyperlink on the internets. He would be a poet and starve if it wasn't for the abundance of actually useful projects he undertakes. He thinks more than he writes. And who doesn't? They should put him in a zoo, feed him and keep his environment controlled for climate and cirrcadian interruptions. He can live out his life in a garbage-filled alley meticulously making imagistic snippets from eveyr piece of garbage and miscellany, taking about the swirling and the sounds and the contrasts between ground and sky and the sounds of the door and the infrequent passers-by and the puddles and the sunshine and the heat shimmers and the dew. But how can an anarchic big-city alley be a zoo? You'd be surprised. How many artist's colonies are just that? Running to nature is not the way modern artists should tell people what they live for. Sadly, nature no longer pleases us on a conscious level. I know this is contentious, but bear with me. Flowers and the names of three or four species of fern will not help me deal with life. It will not sweeten my present. My present is a brick wall; it is a mentally ill person sleeping on a concrete bench half a block from me; I'll spare you further synecdoches. Unless you address this, you are not addressing me, and nowadays you are not addressing the majority of humanity. Burn those quaint little islands to the ground! I have no interest in soil. People are much more fruitful, wherever they may be. So don't follow the mid-brain drives of our ancestors all the goddamn time! You are supposed to be an innovator, artist! Innovate! Be relevant! Be as The Scribbler and hope for the best. You won't starve, at any rate.

Consider: "An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex."