Thirty minutes

Today, an idea entered my mind, “write for thirty-minutes, every-day, for only thirty minutes.” Naturally, what followed was the question regarding editing.

“Do I allow myself time to edit?”

No. This is about writing, not editing. It is not about moving a sentence here, replacing a word there, etc..

No, this exercise will be more akin to the quote attributed to Ernest Hemingway (I’m almost certain that he said it, though I’m not looking up the quote because, again, this is about writing!), “Write drunk, edit sober.”

I have no idea what I shall be writing about in the thirty minutes. I don’t know if anyone, other than myself, and close friends (bless them), will read any of this. I’m not sure that who is currently writing cares all that much. That is fine.

At the end of the day, I recognize that I put off writing for a myriad of reasons: there are other things to do, I haven’t come up with a good idea, nothing has piqued my interest, and the ultimate reason – I simply don’t feel like it. There is hope, somewhere inside of me, that by writing for 30-minutes a day, every day, that I’ll produce something I’ve been hoping to create for a very long time (or, at a minimum, it will get me in the habit of writing).

I have always wanted to write a book. A book about what? I don’t know. I began to write a book when I was a sophomore in High School. To the best of my knowledge, the only person who has a copy of that first chapter – if one could call it a chapter – is my English Teach, Jessica Bench. I have Googled Mrs. Bench to see if I could find a way to get in touch with her, and all searches have yielded the same result, no contact information.

I still recall how the chapter went, specifically the FBI agent, handing his cellphone to the local PD, and telling him to get the President of The United States on the phone.

“Sir?” officer said, covering the mouthpiece of the phone, “they’re saying the President is very busy.”

“I don’t care if he is playing golf on the goddamn moon! I need him on the phone!”

I remember feeling proud of that scene (I used ‘adult language’ in my book, and I was only sixteen!), and now, thinking back, I chuckle. Yes, of course, it is only natural that an FBI agent demand that the President of The United States of America answers his call. Why wouldn’t that happen?

Good times.

The timer has just gone off in the kitchen; it is time to remove the bacon from the oven. I haven’t had bacon in weeks due to COVID-19. It isn’t that I haven’t had access to it (our freezer says that cooking this bacon is long overdue), it is that I haven’t felt like cooking bacon. I’d rather be making sourdough!

With the number of baked goods I’ve been making, it is truly a wonder that I haven’t put on twenty pounds. Or, perhaps I have? How would I know? We don’t own a scale (nor do I want one).

Ok. I need to take the bacon out of the oven. [Pause – so much for uninterrupted writing time; I didn’t plan this out well]

It fascinates me that how we frame experience is such a significant factor in how we interpret experience. Take the smell of bacon as an example. If bacon is part of your diet, and you enjoy it, then, typically, the smell of bacon is euphoric. And, at the same time, there are times where you want the smell of bacon to leave and never return (when you’ve finished cooking back, and your entire apartment smells like – you guessed it! – bacon).

In sum, a lot of what is on my mind today is the subjectivity of life. Perhaps I am woefully ignorant, but it would seem as though there are limited experiences, or objects, or what-have-you, that fall under the objective experience. “Hard sciences” might be something like that, and even there, it seems as though a conclusion is subjective. After all, there isn’t a grand-unifying-theory out there to unify all the theories of “hard sciences.”

And, with that, I believe my thirty minutes is up. Tomorrow, I’ll set a timer.