Brain spill

 That was very nice, and was hell on my schedule. After grocery shopping today, Mom thought we should drop in on Belmont Station to stock up on a few good beers for the pantry from their amazing selection, and then she unexpectedly decided we should try eating lunch in the little side taproom. The sandwiches will be worth going back for – purple onions making a lovely fresh snap in the mouth – and then (we were at a great beer store, after all) I tried something called a "double tripel," which worked out to be a Belgian-style take on an imperial IPA, which was quite pleasing but which deranged any plans I might have had beyond unloading the groceries once we got back. 

 
There’s a flyer advertising my editing services that I need to cobble together, especially now that a friend has volunteered to plaster her city with it. Having just finally gotten my head back on straight, at about 8 p.m. (never underestimate a glass of beer with "double" in the name), … well, I guess I’ll be tackling the flyer tomorrow morning.
 
Even if I’d had lemonade with the sandwich that flyer would still be more trouble for me than the word count would account for. I’m being an idiot about it, I can tell. I hate advertising myself – touting myself. I have the wrong reflexes about it. Don’t puff yourself up. For God’s sake don’t let anyone see you puffing yourself up. The actual work would be easy, just sweat bullets a bit and then do it.  But saying "hi, I do this work well"… faugh. Exactly the wrong reflexes for work-hunting. I need to fix on some formulated phrases and then get used enough to using them that I don’t notice them anymore.
 
Or, shorter: The actual work would be easy, but the spaces between make me self-conscious as hell.
 
***
 
I’m still startled at how vehemently I’m against copywriting for hire. And how utterly crippled I think I’d be at it if I tried. I’m in full-blown malfunction about it, when I think to look myself over. I hadn’t been thinking about it at all, at ALL, one way or the other, and then Elizabeth(! of all people, unexpected chat in AIM) suggested the website Textbroker, where you can do little bits of writing for extra money, and right off the bat, hearing about it, I thought it was a great idea, a bet-hedger… and then… 
 
I may write well, sometimes, when I’m thinking, or when I’m trying to explain something. But when I think of copywriting, writing something that says such-and-such that someone else wants to say – I can’t even imagine what doing that well would be like. Sometimes I’m told I write well, when I write well, but … how do I say this? That isn’t the point. It’s like the distinction between fluff and not-fluff. It’s all fluff. Huge rafts of things are fluff. I don’t think I could tell the difference between good and bad and just right and bloody awful, as I was typing it out. What would I say? About the very simplest thing that anyone could fill in words about. 
 
I barely think of myself as a writer at all, anymore, in any sense. And/but, still, there is this monstrous sense that copywriting would be… whoring. If I did it. Which is a ridiculous thing to say about something that lots of people do and that I don’t mind that they do. 
 
When I write something, I mean it. That applies to the technical-support advice I’ve done, too, that I used to write reams of. 
 
And somehow those three paragraphs are all talking about, not two or three different things, but the same thing.  … I don’t speak Alex.
 
And maybe that’s all nonsense, which is the way it looks when I read back over it now, and for that matter it’s the way it looked when I thought about it before. (How would writing, I don’t know, some text on somebody’s "About Us" page be a great violation of anything, or a microscopic one either, for me, for anybody? I don’t have a blinking great artist anything. It’s barmy.)  But then I come back to the other thing: copyediting is work. It’s work. Never mind that it’s an art too, copyediting doesn’t have any of that other stuff about it. Copyediting is definitely goddamned plain work, definable effort to effect rather than puffery, @#$%*& honest toil and dignity of labor, and I want to work.
 
***
 
Heck, that’s just brain spill. Just me feeling through it. For all I know, I should set to and start copywriting for hire tomorrow. The money would be good.  If anyone notes me an argument to that effect, I have no counterargument. This is just … brain spill.  And possibly evidence that trying to get into freelancing will drive you mad as a mudfly. Or that some of us have a head start.
 
***
 
The momentary is going to gang up on me… overall proportion is going to mug me.  It’s coming.
 
Gwen can’t have the momentary savorings anymore, the enjoyments, the appreciations of art and fancy. This, our treasure house. I used to enjoy them with her, and now I enjoy them for her, and maybe pipeline some for her… but at the same time there is a nagging feeling that this is not what one is supposed to be doing.  (And Gwen was a person who knew that.)  And now one Australian I know has written a "First World Problems" entry, and another Australian has been talking about larger context and sense of proportion – I chatted with her briefly this afternoon while still recovering from that "double tripel" (I didn’t quite ask her for pictures of her boobs, but I was far gone enough to advise her of her narrow escape) – and I do not know what it is with these Antipodeans always sparking me.
 
Yes, I can’t act like spending money on Game of Thrones DVDs is the whole world for very much longer.  I know that.
 
There was a mad letter I wrote Gwen and Angie once upon a time (with some graphical tricks in it which I now can’t remember how I did) in which I proposed a "Radio Club" … -like… thing.  Some sort of unspecified projecting or conspiring that the three of us were supposed to figure out and do, for the good for the world.  And now it’s these many years later, and we’re a man down, and the other two of us are still scratching our heads.
 
Did you know that the Asian elephant is much more endangered than the African? I didn’t.  I should have, but I think I had the idea that, because Asian elephants are often used as a beast of burden, they had to be much more secure; you know, as you don’t think of domesticated animals being in trouble; they’re on our team, they have a role, so.  It isn’t so. If you look at a map of their current range and habitat, it’s all broken up into all these little islands… Species do better when their habitat is contiguous, or where there are contiguous routes between the areas of habitat.  When they’re all broken up… then things can go wrong for each little blob in isolation, like stars goingout one after another. And then, of course, there’s the ivory trade.
 
We are terrible at taking care of the things that bright ten-year-olds know about, the things that bright ten-year-olds learn from us are important. Maybe the old ’60s slogan about turning thirty was horribly optimistic, and it really should have been, "Never trust anyone who’s reached puberty." 
 
(And then, at puberty, personality strikes and we start thinking it’s about us, our evolving self and story. And then we all get involved in jobs and building families and thinking about the economy and we think you have to look at it all through that crabbed perspective. And meanwhile we sift everything through filters so that all of our long-held opinions, and our senses of proportion, are held to have been about right.  And then we have the nerve to keep proclaiming and retransmitting that children’s brains aren’t wired properly yet.)
 
I don’t want to be like all those tired baby boomers I’ve ground my teeth to the bone about.
 
I think the grinding gridlock, social and formal, in America has gotten to me. Maybe another country (with its problems, certainly) would be in a way better for my head. Here it has been seeming like nothing’s going to move, and the more informed I am, the more I seem to know about how nothing’s going to move, and about the organized forces of… well-developed antibodies, perfected ways of not even needing to hear more.
 
Maybe I should trace my discontent back to reading National Geographic’s children’s magazine World in the 1970s.  We were finding out all this stuff about the environment, and we were going to take care of it. And we were on the moon, and the moon was just going to be our first foothold, because why wouldn’t it be; what other route would a space program take? (If you take it that space and environmental concerns are two different matters, well, I didn’t, and don’t now for more reason – but it’s a long story.)  We did things, intelligent things.  I was talking to Christy, and I was saying that one special difference with my own discontent was that many of the things that weren’t happening were things I thought I had been promised in the 1970s.  She agreed that she did not have the same sense of promises betrayed.  When I was a kid the big important things seemed to be underway. And now they are… perpetual sidebars?
 
Even @$#%^@ climate change, for all its scale and with all its implications, seems a perpetual sidebar! Almost a second- or third-string one!  If it looks different to you, I congratulate you.
 
And I have not even mentioned civil liberties stuff… or for that matter, war, poverty…
 
No. I haven’t forgotten the world.  And I’m still looking for my Radio Club.