start at the very beginning, it's a very good place to start.

It all started with a song about a star. A kind sleepy melody and a simple lyrics, the burbled up from a heavy, tired chest in the bunk bed next to me. My daddy wrote that song for a girl who broke his heart with her broken heart. It changed everything.

Because of what she did to him, and because of the only way he knew to tell it, the world held the soft glow of love and I could sleep at night. Words and I have had a closer relationship than I've had with any other living thing. Since the beginning of my always, they and I have been able to shape one another, and so I have chosen to use them. They will be my life's work. We will tell the stories that need to be told. This is where today's little conundrum pops up.

I chose to start my freelance writing career today. Make a portfolio, pick intense amounts of projects to send bids for, gather my reccomendations and become a writer, or something like that. So it's four thirty in the afternoon and i'm still staring at my computer. Nothing has happened, so I did what any sensible person will do, I began to complain to my friend Paul. This is how it went.

"I hate newton"
"Isaac?"
"No, fig. Yes, Isaac."
"But why?"
"Because objects at rest suck, and I'm not doing very well with finding a force in myself to make it go."
"Ah, but Newton did something nice for you too"
"Pfff."
"An object in motion will stay in motion."

Needless to say, Rachel was chastised and so much humble pie eaten that I in fact felt the need to unbutton my pants. So half dressed and needing to feel righteous in my frustration one more time, I went looking for sagelike advice from Google. I typed in "beginnings." Galileo was pretty useless, Lao Tsu kept saying the same thing over and over and over and over again, Rainer Maria Rilke, who I would typically side with over nearly anyone else had a fabulous idea;
"It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning." but no procedural advice on how one actually gets around a beginning, because no matter where you think you are starting, you still have to start. The whole concept became a distracting tautological monstrosity. My brain in it's desperation to procrastinate fled to a land of inanimate "I am that I am" logic, and it was Moses and the stinkin burning bush all over again. I had to take a coffee break, it was pretty dreadful.

I was truly beginning to run out of steam. I seem to do that very easily about writing, because it may very well be the love of my life, and like any adolescent with a crush, I'm pretty sure I'm not good enough for it. The end of the quotes on beginnings was nearing, and the fickle tickleof inspiration was still far far far away. Then I found this: “I had as many doubts as anyone else. Standing on the starting line, we're all cowards.” This quote more than any other touched me, but it still wasn't enough to make me commit the violent crime of beginning. What came after it was. There was that beautiful elipses and then the words Alberto Salazar, Sprinter. Inone word thinkexist.com told me exactly what he had started, and how many thousands of times he had to begin. If he hadn't, he'd have been Alberto Salazar, Stander. Alberto Salazar, Coward. Alberto Salazar, Spectator. Maybe there woudln't be any descriptor, maybe no one would ever know his words.

I've done everything I could today, except start. Which means I'm going to have to spend tomorrow and the next day and the next day coiled in my cowardly starting position. I'll waste the beautiful potential of all that kinetic energy as precious seconds tick by, and both what I want and the starting line sit exactly where they are, waiting for me to decide if I'm going to be a revolutionary or a receptionist. Starting lines don't make up their minds to get the heck out of your way very often, so I suppose I should get cracking on that descriptor, because if one sweet song from my daddy can change my whole life, imagine what could happen with a whole life of words.

-- Rachel Baxa, Writer. :)

forkforkforkforkfork

the sad truth is this: I have not written in almost two months. Whoa. I have written nothing, absolutely nothing. I haven't been able to complete a goodbye email, a scrap of poetry, or even a grocery list in many moons.

I've been listening.

Have you ever said a word over and over again until it was nonsense? Try it. Fork. Fork. Fork. Forkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkfork. It's hardly gibberish, it's worse because it's the same meaningless nonsense Mork and Mindy blabber, even to the insane and alien. Suddenly, a real thought is forced by relentless echo into redundant silliness. I've been listening to my thoughts become blather.

They had significance, once upon a dream. But in my silence they have circled and swum inside my head and through their dizzy dancing have been reduced to a hazy din as appealing and distracting as ceaseless buzzing of a tired fluorescent lightbulb. Not good for productivity or a glowing complexion.

I've done to my poor thoughts what constant fifth-grader repetition does to the word fork. By refusing the object it's purpose I've reduced it from a useful utensil to onomatopoeic balderdash. Suddenly, all I'm left with is a sound, an echo, a song, a game of no skill at all. Over the past couple of months I've gotten good at this game. TV, sleep, easy books, the same songs over and over again, and always that nauseating buzz of what I know melting away into what I knew.

I have been without a certain depth of conscience and consideration that makes me a person I could delight in being. Keeping confined to my own section of the Universe as I know it, I have reached out for very little, taken very few chances and never once allowed my own reason to get a word in edgewise. Being back home in the naked Northeastern Colorado landscape hasn't solved all my problems, but out that window under a sparkling layer of disappearing snow, is a cracking parched land that has finally, when I made myself look, reminded me of how untrue I've been to the girl i strove so desperately to hew from that exhausted soil.

All this time, I've been mistaking the alarm of my disloyalty for a petty migraine. A call to the truth about myself has been lurking in the drone I've learned to tune out, waiting for it's moment to remind me of the voice and depth I owe to my life. So that sucks. Wasted time makes me angry.

Fork.