Writing Longhand and the Art of Burning

Lotta bullshit going around about AI. Are kids learning to express themselves through writing? Is it helping adult performance at the workplace? Is it worth drinking up the Great Lakes and murdering polar bears to make sure people online can create images of Brad Pitt naked riding a unicorn with Ginger Spice's arms wrapped around his midsection or better they are a conjoined twin centaur bound for eternity in the Forest of Joy after making a beautiful wish at the Butterfly Fountain?

     No. I don't think any of that is true. 

     I am an avowed writer in longhand. Look up there. That picture. That's my handwriting some notes to type out this nonsense. Get some ideas down in general form and then type some bullshit out. If I get lost in the weeds of conjoined twin centaurs I check back to those notes and here we are. 

     I learned to write longhand. Imagine me, a young Brad Pitt, tongue sticking out as I painstakingly created each letter to make each word to write out a small ransom note to my younger sister. If she had paid or could read, she would have seen those Barbie heads again.

      Computers kinda sucked when I was growing up. Useful internet did not arrive at our house until 2000 or so and by then I was off in college finding much better uses for it in Yahoo chat forums. In south Mississippi, minor blips in power were common. Once I decided to use the family Compaq to write a paper and lost everything when a squirrel reached too far on a powerline. The little bastard hung there like a morbid trapeze artist for several days, and each day I cursed his little squirrel soul. My whole point to all this is I did not regularly turn in papers nice and typed until college. Everything was handwritten from conception to execution, and I often turned in the first draft because I did not want to rewrite that shit again.

     I was gonna make this a numbered list thing, but fuck it. Here's the real reason I still write notes and a lot of things longhand. There's tons of studies that say it helps memory or whatever, but for me I just like the physical thing. I like pens and changing the ink in a fountain pen and the messiness and the scratch a pen makes on paper. I like different kinds of paper from rough to smooth to heavy to light. I like when the ink hits the paper and you see it fill the fibers like a flowing river of capillary action. I like writing a thing and having a thing that I'm holding in my hand. Having dozens of papers that make up a story and feeling the weight of all those words. I love how ink and time can make paper weigh so much more.

     And I like that it burns. I like that if I hate the thing I write I can tear it up. Burn it. Sow the ashes into my garden and when the tomatoes ripen on the vine I can crush them into a paste and make spaghetti. Spite spaghetti created from the failure of a short story about a conjoined centaur just tastes so good. And the paper is gone, my thoughts and pages of work are just gone. I could have kept them but they angered me so. I have tried to do all this with a computer, but the fumes from the burning made my head ache and the spaghetti tasted oily.

     Anyway, fuck the computer for writing. It's ephemeral. Nothing. A speedier way for me to make nonsense like this that means little to nothing.

     But if you like it, shine on bright star. Plenty of ways to cross the river and more ways to drown.