I am at an odd juncture with regards to my internet writing. I do a lot of writing for my job, which I enjoy quite a lot, but that’s taken away from the time I’ve put into the site as of recent.

Please accept this photo of a table as atmospherically satisfying accompaniment

I have been in the midst of an internal struggle over whether or not this is all that problematic for me. I haven’t put anything on YouTube in a good while either, for example, but I’m fine with letting the makeshift-YouTuber part of my life drift off into the seas of the past. I still enjoy the act and practice of creative writing on a site like this, but to be frank – I don’t know what the hell to blog about anymore. 

My social media/internet connections fray further and further by the day. The bulk of my knowledge of internet goings-on comes from the “After Midnight” comedy game show on CBS, and I’m fine with gawking from the side of the road at them now rather than trying to catch waves that seem to move quicker and break much more shallowly than they did when I was having fun with web culture. 

And yet, I want to write. I want to write things and put them out. I want the satisfaction of an idea well-composed and put to a webpage. But I must have ideas to compose said webpages, and I just don’t have enough red meat circulating my head at the moment. These are the major things parading in my craw based off of my experiences of the past week (give or take):

• Squirrels are far more interesting to watch up close than I had given them credit for being
• I do not know most of the types of trees that line the paths in my neighborhood
• The Las Vegas Aces hit on three straight top picks in the late-2010s and built around that foundation in truly impressive fashion, though this season has started poorly with the absence of Chelsea Gray. A’ja Wilson now finds herself in the midst of a season in which she dominates on a struggling team, which is narratively interesting if difficult for a fan of the team to watch
• Running on a treadmill seems to drag less when I eschew any sort of audio accompaniment
• Grackles are far more interesting to watch up close than I had given them credit for being
• The Nature Valley Biscuit has been a part of my daily life for nearly four years now
• I should have read The Green Mile all the way through when I had a paperback copy of it back in ~2015
• It would be funny to do a karaoke version of Hunger Strike by Temple of the Dog in which I try to do both the Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell parts
• I didn’t find Showgirls all that enlightening, nor really all that good, but I would recommend that people see it
• Robins are far more interesting to watch up close than I had given them credit for being

None of them feel immediately post-worthy in my eyes. I don’t really have that many post-worthy thoughts at the moment. I’m not thinking in posts anymore. This has been a tremendous boon to my general mental well-being and happiness, but a detriment to my online posting habits. It reminds me of what happened with Michael C. Hall’s character at the end of the Documentary Now episode “Any Given Sunday Afternoon,” when speaking to a psychiatrist about his childhood traumas leaves him worse at bowling. This is a tradeoff that I’m mostly willing to make, though I don’t know that it must be a tradeoff.

So here’s what I’m going to do: I will take three writing prompts from this website and respond to them in as much detail as I see fit. I will continue to do this until I either start generating new, post-worthy ideas or grow tired of the exercise and sink back into non-posting. 

Prompt 1: Create a mind map starting with the word imaginary.

Imaginary would be the word I’d use to start this mind mapping exercise, if I knew off the top of my head what a mind map was. If a mind map is a visualization of my mind, then I can guarantee at the very least which region of the mind would not contain the words “mind map” (i.e. the aforementioned top). I am a habitual brainstormer. I love brainstorming. I tend to brainstorm linearly, though, by which I mean that I either write my ideas between the lines of notebook paper or legal pad paper. A mind-map sounds less linear, and also like more of a drawing exercise than a writing exercise. I suppose I could do sort of an in-between, like create MapQuest directions to the word imaginary, perhaps? Is the destination ‘Imaginary’ or the starting point? For the sake of this, it’ll need to be the starting point:

Imaginary is our starting point. From “Imaginary”, we’re met with a fork in the road that either points right to “concretized” or left to “philosophized”. I have focused too much on heading right in the recent months (I think a significant part of the problem with my writing process now is that I really only care about putting ideas into practice and just having and speaking opinions does not feel that valuable, or at least not as valuable as turning my opinions into something more concrete) so I will turn left, which should have been apparent from the lengthy parenthetical in the prior sentence. Now that I’m on Philosophized Street, I look ahead of me and realize that the paths ahead seem to interconnect and overlap in confusing manners. I am overwhelmed by this choice and decide to sit in the front seat of my car and allow myself to be overwhelmed. I let my eyes unfocus, the crisscrossing fractal of paths dancing upon itself like the edges of the characters in an episode of Dr. Katz. At this point I realize that the mental model I’m using for this metaphorical mental map is that confusing Yoshi Valley track from Mario Kart 64. The one with the big egg that flattens you. Yeah, I see it over there. It’s right by the limited amount that I know about the subconscious. MR. JUNG, LOOK OUT! THE BIG YOSHI EGG IS GOING TO RUN YOU OVER!

Prompt 2: Write a poem about the beauty of the night sky and the stars.

I write poetry better by hand:

For those unable to parse my cursive:

It would be a treat, a dream
to spread a quilt out in the grass
illuminated by moonbeam
hands intertwined with lovely lass

I would let the stars fill my sight
Have their brilliance overtake me
Lose track of what’s left and what’s right
Like I do in Yoshi’s Valley

The sight would amaze, but my breath
is taken by other senses
The gentle sighs heard from the depth
of her chest as it condenses

Tenderness felt in the spaces
where our fingers lay softly laced
Summer air felt on our faces
On these things my wonder is based

The joys of this life burn brighter
With a special person in tow
But be spry, look sharp, my lover
The giant egg cometh, oh no!

Prompt 3: Write a story set in a world where gravity works differently.

For the first time in too long, and even longer in this particular color, the Meadowlands buzzed with the energy of postseason football. Men had grown old, boys had grown into men, nascent couples had grown into nuclear families, and Hall of Fame careers had started and finished in the decades between instances of Kelly Green dominating the East Rutherford grandstands in January. The last time anyone had seen this, it was in a different stadium, in a different era, led-in by a different song. 

The idle milling of the Jet faithful met a quick decrescendo as the PA announcer’s baritone brogue sounded over the concourses. “Ladies and Gentlemen. Please rise if you are able for the singing of our national anthem… and please welcome, for the first time since his song’s 2007 release, record-shattering rise, and usurpation of Francis Scott Key’s poem, whose iron-grip on the national consciousness had long grown stale, Bridgeport, Connecticut’s own… John Mayer.”

A gasp overtook the crowd. He was here? The last NFL team to host a playoff game after the controversial, but successful, 2008 campaign to replace the Star-Spangled Banner with Mayer’s inescapable balladic earworm that took an unforeseeable chokehold over every type of Billboard chart due to its plucking of an indescribable quality existing in this version of the world (but missing from the one in which you read this story), which led the song to reverberate impossibly well with every American of all backgrounds and ideologies, was to be graced by the presence of its creator? Jet fans rose together, placed their hands over their hearts, and sung along with their national anthem’s opening verse:

“Gravity… Stay the hell away from me…”

I think that worked reasonably well! I can feel the cobwebs getting dusted away as I type this little send-off bit. I can hear the music from Yoshi Valley encroaching from the back of my mind, too… and is that… on the horizon… no, it can’t be! The giant egg cometh! Oh no!