Tuesday, July 13, 2010

The long run

That's a song by the Eagles and not one of my favorites, and it's not even about what I'm taking it to be about, but there you go. When I was in college we played a game when we got high that consisted of making up new uses for common objects found around the room. That's what my story is about, but not what I'm saying now.

What I'm saying now is just literal, "we'll find out in the long run." What was most frustrating, and amounted to the final straw, in my career in academic writing, is the distance between an idea, even a great idea, and it's publication, it's sharing with readers. By the time it got shared, the editors had changed it into something that wouldn't look out of place in their living rooms, and I couldn't even remember what I was thinking when I started, or how I got to where they finished with me. Pouring my life down the drain really.

So I don't want to get stuck between the temporal and cognitive illusion that there's less time between now and then there has to be, like thinking you can fit into a parking space that way too small just because you want a parking space right now. And I don't want to be slave to the illusion that the longer I wait, the longer I work, the better it will be. My SAT word for the day is attenuate: "to reduce in force, value, amount, or degree; weaken." There's a thousand sayings, all of them true. Strike while the iron is hot. Stupid, but then you get the image, the burning ingot, the hard hammer and anvil, the sweat in the eyes, the work of entropy ...

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