kryptowrite

[backslashes \ \ denotate extended tangents/memories/sub-thoughts, with parentheses ( ) for shorter asides, to help organize the reading experience a little. youre on your own beyond that]

Shit like this is my kryptonite. \ wait, how does kryptonite actually work? it makes superman weaker, right? not like that. is there an arc where superman gets addicted to kryptonite because he just loves the way it makes him feel? superman thinks about it...often. when he's not holding those beautiful, smooth, glimmering crystals in his square hands, he's counting down seconds until the next time. it's easier than the problems in front of him that he doesn't know how to confront yet. idk.

he grows attached to one type of kryptonite, then runs out and has to settle for another, which he ends up loving more or less than the last. he dreams of synthesizing his own one day, every day. the perfect blend to transport sad weird kids out of this reality and into somewhere really special, somewhere they can actually grow.

several years go by. he's learned how to hold a conversation with other people that isn't exclusively taking turns monologuing... or learned how to handle the mental burdens of heroism, i guess, it's supposed to be a superman metaphor here after all. so he doesnt NEED the kryptonite anymore... but he spent so many years with it that he's not sure how to reapproach it now.\

if there were an arc like that in superman, then this WOULD be my kryptonite. writing. first-person writing especially. first-person writing that has no maximum word count, limitations, or necessary goal especially-especially. when you read all the time, it's real easy to fall into the trap of constant self-narration. ignoring the moment because you're too busy narratizing it. preparing for the day you can finally write yourself out of reality and into a fiction that you can actually live in, with no one around to bring you back down to reality.

before i was allowed to have video games of my own as a kid, it was books. it was all books. i mean all the time with this shit.

\i have a formative memory from 2008 (age 8--youre welcome for being born in 1999). i had some awareness of a band of musicians off to the side of the church. but i could barely hear the instruments other than ORGAN. the rest was buried under the clouds of vocalizations--old and young, off key and on, crunchy and smooth, believer and cynic, AAAH and ooo. those sharply-dressed musicians, the smallest of three primary identity groups in a church population, were off to the side of the congregation, in the general seating area.

\\NOT on the raised-up platform where the altar stood; the musicians would NEVER be on the same footing as the INTERPRETER of GOD!!! that, and...catholics like their/our rituals to kinetically mirror the few doctrinal differences they have from protestantism. catholic priests are NECESSARILY different from their church population, versus protestant ministers being 'helpful teachers' *within* that population, and not, like, Your Personal Bless-ed Doorway To God. considering this difference, I understand in hindsight why the musicians were stowed off to the side like Bad mashed potatoes.\\

the musicians played in front of the section of more-comfortable seats that the elderly churchgoers sat in. the rest of us were sentenced to pews. uncomfortable ass on an uncomfortable-ass hard, waxy, perfect right-angle of a wooden church pew. they were cold when you first sat down and warm if they had been sat on. like a toilet seat. exactly like a toilet seat. (hit netflix ex-cath-horror series Midnight Mass WISHES it had thought of this parallel.)

The adults around me stood. I huddled. mentally, i was with my buds percy, annabeth, and grover. or trying to be. I poured my focus over one paragraph. then gave it another coat of attention. and another. ... and another. it’s especially hard to lock in when there’s a lot of noise around. and lots of Legs. lost in a sea of Big People’s garments. the paragraph in the book didnt have any of that, so i had to re-immerse over and over. i wanted to make sure i was Feeling it right.(like restarting a song to Listen instead of merely Hear.)

the sermons never pertained to me. they were always about adult issues... He never used any metaphors i'd understand. lectures about being a good husband or wife. im a kid. why doesnt God have anything to say to me? picture book with that picture of (white) Jesus surrounded by Children of various races. why does that picture exist if god loves adults more than kids? made me sad. made me sad every time i devoted 55 minutes of precious focus on a sermon just to hear if anything relevant to me came up. heart broken pretty much every time. we came up as the implicit receiver of command Obey Thy Father And Mother, nowhere else. giving so many chances that clearly go nowhere. so...when i realized i could still bring a book to church even though i was an Older Kid, reading instead of bathing in Latin and Marital Lectures, I felt like a genius.

my mom’s finger on the page, voice tangible next to my ear. “you’re paying attention to the wrong gods!” gestured at the altar. hint of laughter in her voice at the almost-humor of her own almost-joke(, a trait i share).\

YA novels--I was really glued to the things. i decided to be a writer, go live in another world in my head full-time. but writing took so long, with my clumsy hands. only 30 mins to play RollarCoasterTycoon3 per day, and that's if my siblings don't comandeer the computer all night.

so what do you do? you shape all your thoughts to be writing. so once you finally write, youll be Ready.

it turns out to not be a great way to live. like i threw out there near the start, you really cant hold a back-and-forth if youve trained all your thoughts to be paragraphs instead of normal sentences. plus, if you're already predisposed to tangents-for-the-sake-of-tangents (i.e. built-in variety), it's really easy to egg yourself on. those long streams of consciousness are just for me; who cares if i go down a rabbit hole and don't return? maybe noone. if only there were some way of showing the pros and cons of this together; how shaping all your Thoughts into Narrative ends up making your writing both tedious and special.

[written apr 25, edited/posted apr 28]