I wake up, I get a cup of coffee, I hit the space bar a few times to revive my laptop, and I stare at a blank screen. I take another sip of coffee. I begin to wake up, my eyes are able to focus better on the small characters on the screen, and I stare at a blank page. I may write a few hundred words which I reread and quickly abandon. I return to a blank document and start over. I don’t know how many entries I have made on this webpage but every one has started out similarly.
For every essay posted on this page I have probably left an equal number unfinished; either abandoned to the bowels of my hard drive or simply deleted. I used to scribble on legal pads. I would write down an idea for a gag and work through a few sentences before attempting to compose a more thorough version on the computer. I have stacks of legal pads filled up with gibberish. All this makes me wonder how many hundreds of thousands of words I have either deleted from my computer or tossed in the garbage.
My brother and I used to correspond with each other prolifically. We had each written hundreds of single-spaced pages that we kept in a single, on-going document. We both lost these documents that chronicled our thoughts and intellectual development over the period of about five years.
I lost mine when I chucked my old Texas Instruments laptop. When I went from WordPerfect to MS Word I couldn’t get the documents to convert. I had the old computer lying around so I figured that one day I would figure it out. I forgot how to print from WordPerfect so I didn’t make a hard copy of this document. I finally pitched the old computer. I also lost several hundred letters to friends that I had written during the time I had that machine. I don’t mention this because I feel it is any loss to the world of literature.
All of the notebooks rotting in landfills and all of the zeros and ones deleted into thin air are like all of the notes I have played on my piano. It’s a good thing that those poorly-played musical phrases are gone forever. The tossed notebooks and deleted entries are also where they belong. All of that was simply practice. This is practice.
