Why do I do it?

There's no denying that penning these pointless posts is therapeutic for me. The question is why writing nothing for no one to read would be therapeutic. I don't exactly have the answer. I might guess that it has something to do with the physical sensation of typing, or banging away at the keyboard, as the case may be. I certainly don't get anything out of writing with pen or pencil on paper, although, of the two, I much prefer the pencil. The lack of friction the ball point pen presents leaves me feeling disconnected and adrift. At any rate, I like to type. It might have to do with my continual amazement that I can type, albeit with many, many errors. In high school I barely passed typing class and the fact that I did pass had nothing to do with my actually having learned to type. I could not, in fact, type a single word at the conclusion of that class. I passed, with a solid D, only because I took pity on poor, frail Mrs. Darwin, my teacher. My classmates harassed her mercilessly for being, I fear, in the early stages of dementia or Alzheimer's. I did not, and so she returned the favor by giving me an undeserved passing grade. Or maybe she didn't have the slightest idea who I was or whether I could type or not, who knows. I didn't attend enough of my classes when I was briefly enrolled in community college to need to type anything, so it wasn't until much later that I gave typing any further thought. When I did eventually decide to learn to type I did it with a computer program called Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. I got it for $9.95 in the bargain bin at Staples and it may well have been the best $9.95 I've ever spent. It wasn't even my $9.95, I submitted it as an office expense to my employer. Mavis Beacon accomplished what poor Mrs. Darwin could not, she taught me to type. And so I do.

Maybe the therapeutic effect has nothing to do with typing. Maybe it's simply that the act of writing anything requires one to be fully engaged in the task at hand. You cannot write, even something as inane as one of my blog posts, and do anything else at the same time. I can't anyway. I'm trying to do it right now and it certainly seems impossible. I just finished reading a book by Kurt Vonnegut, one of my all time favorite authors. In this book he says that the science fiction writer Kilgore Trout (actually Trout is Vonnegut's alter ego and a vehicle for Vonnegut to present some of his wackier ideas) enjoyed writing because "he could tune out the crock of shit being alive was as long as he was scribbling, head down, with a ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad." Trout tends to be a little succinct. Anyway, writing is a bit like yoga done correctly or meditation in that way. It pulls you into the moment. Most people, myself included, have nothing to write these days other than perhaps a blog post. In the old days I used to occasionally write letters to friends when the mood struck me. You can't do that anymore though, Al Gore put a stop to letter writing when he invented the internet. I don't think the Postal Service delivers letters anymore. They've shifted their business to delivering the glossy catalogs that we use to fill up our recycling bin and also to delivering all of the small items that we purchase on the interweb that we never knew we even needed before we had the interweb. I suppose some people write in a journal, and I wish I could, believe me, but it doesn't work for me. For one thing, no one, not even yours truly, can read my handwriting. So that leaves me here, tapping away at this machine. Sometimes I swear the machine tells lies. But that's okay because I don't really care what I write, it's the writing that I like. And if you think the stuff that you're reading is a little, you know, incoherent, you should see the stuff that's too far out there for me to even post. Wheeee!