Wouldn't It Be Nice


Dear Eugene,

Write like it is a newfound liberty, the soul cries out.

I have this little Chromebook on my lap that any writer of any age would die for.  Any age but this age.  Not this age.  Because we have it.

If we don't have it, we might have imagined it: Wow, wouldn't it be nice to just move your fingers on a little slab of dark plastic and have words dance out of their tips and their steps go out to the end of the world in a nanosecond?  Wouldn't it be nice to correct the ambiguous pronoun their, both of them, in the last sentence without reaching for a new parchment and cursing yourself for the stupid mistake...s?

Wouldn't it be nice...?

It's nice, very nice, and we have it very very nicely now.   But who writes?  We've found a little slab of dark plastic called liberty but lost our reason for finding it on our exodus journey.

Not that it was a journey we took anyway, maybe that's the problem.  Someone else walked the path, trudged a trail, to make freedom possible.  Now that it becomes possible, we are finding it less probable that it's something worth finding at the first place.  We were writing a joke and are now finally done with it, after all these years and tears, and find ourselves on the punchline.  We put ourselves on the punchline and that's our first and final masterpiece.  We are done with writing now because the liberty to write was done to us, willy-nilly.  To say No to writing is now the new freedom.

 Live like it is a newfound freedom, the soul cries out again.

But what the hell does that mean, aren't we living and living enough already?  Doing another Costco run that I don't need to do is a way to live, isn't it?  Judge you not, the belly growls.  To say Yes to unfreedom is a sort of protest, don't you know?  Someone owes me something I don't know what and who but sure as hellfire someone owes me something.  Pick a note and stick to the tune and you get yourself a reason to bitch and maybe then we will all write again.  Fight for a cause and the cause better be chic.  Make things look messy and sound messy and maybe I will find my Messianic call and wake up on time tomorrow morning.  For once.

Wouldn't it be nice?

Yours, Alex




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