January 3-4, 2015

Taking a couple of weeks off from writing this diary had a number of specific effects: 1) Loss of voice. How did I sound again? 2) Loss of mission. Why was I writing these? 3) Loss of meaning. What was I saying? This kind of dilemma has lead me to a dreadful place my students inhabited more than once -- the land of writing an essay about writing an essay. It was a place to which I responded with a certain hand-on-the-back-of-my-neck acceptance. Of course I had to take their work; after all, it wasn't as though they were trying to get by with yet another (ahem) Top Ten List.

And in this essay about writing an essay, one of my threefold goals will indeed be the recovery of my voice. The trouble being that voice is the hardest thing to restore to its rightful place as first, if not most important, thing. So what the fuck am I supposed to do -- start swearing a blue streak? If I had time and inclination here, I might clear my throat by way of a *shudder* mini-lesson about how to avoid the three kinds of sentence faults, but I reckon I have tried your patience enough as it is, so I will leave it at this: there are two kinds of clauses in the English language -- independent and dependent. If you put two or more independent clauses in the same sentence unit without proper punctuation (such as we went to the beach we had a great time), that is a run-on sentence; however, linking those clauses with a comma (as in we went to the beach, we had a great time) results in the specialized form of run-on known as a comma splice. Finally, God help us all if you precede an independent clause with a conjunctive adverb (don't ask!!!) such as because (as in Because we went to the beach.); the result will be a dependent clause, or a sentence fragment. For notes on how to avoid each one of these, see me after class, ya mugs.

So. Having recovered my voice, how am I supposed to restore my sense of mission? Having gone without writing one of these for this long, what makes it necessary to start up again now? I suppose I might just as well ask why not now, or how could I take two weeks with only sporadic, fitful false starts for my troubles before finally getting around to the real deal. In this formulation success was inevitable as rain in April, and yet according to The Rule of the Rock Concert in which an effective essay follows roughly the same pattern in organizing its ideas as does a rock concert by first catching the interest of those attending, holding it through the middle by playing the ballads while fans go take care of a natural function, before roaring back into the closing numbers, the encores, and woooo! Am I ever glad I came to see these guys! -- according to that rule, this should be the weakest section of the essay. And by golly, I believe that is the case.

To be sure, it somehow doesn't seem as vital to the enterprise as remembering exactly what it was I wanted to say here. And now it all comes back to me: what I wanted to show, not tell, here was the day to day of my life with Parkinson's Disease, which would be accomplished not by trips to AbstractLand, as I once described to my students as the tendency to slip into the land of thoughts and feelings, but rather by staying firmly and resolutely In The Room, chiefly through the use of sensory details. To succeed at this is to leave that letter I promised in the first entry of this diary summing up my final thoughts to friends, former students and extended family. It can be as simple as what it's like to walk confidently up the stairs due to the hammerlock miracle and as complicated as explaining how it came to be that I started to hear my brother's voice coming out of me after he passed.

In the end, though, any success must be conditional at best, and particularly so in the deeply flawed enterprise that is writing an essay about writing an essay. Still, as I responded to the poor, misguided souls who proposed the same to me, "If you must," and "Whatever you do, don't roll in here with some hang-dog expression on your face next Monday, and say, 'I did it but I did it wrong.' THERE IS NO WRONG, if you do it. The only wrong is if you don't write the freaking essay." Along about here in the pep talk, I would pass on the three most important words in any writer's vocabulary: GIVE ME CRAP. That's right, lower your standards, get down in the gutter, and turn out the worst piece of writing imaginable. Because if you wait around for the golden stuff to appear, you will never write one single word, and so you have to be willing to turn out a lot of crap to get to the gold. Frost said it best: "No way out, but through," so GIVE ME CRAP.

Ha! I hope I haven't followed my own advice too faithfully.