I'm a storyteller but I'm the worst kind

My muse has escaped me.

It struck me today- midday- because today was Talk About Poetry Finding You day, and there was Neruda with his infinitesimal pinpricks and Giovanni with her no-limits poetic explosion, and there I was: empty-minded.

I wrote because I told myself I had to, because I am trying to be more disciplined with my writing, and mostly because I always promise my poetry class that I will write every time they write. It's a fancy trick, that class. Last fall, I couldn't stop writing. Stanzas were thundering off the margins of my notebook. Theme, purpose, creativity itself deserted me: often, I was more a student than a teacher. I sat in the thick of creation.

But now. Muse? Whipped right out of me. I don't know when/how/why she left me. Maybe she's hiding. Maybe I've accidentally smothered her. Maybe I'm not suppose to know.

(Honestly: I think my muse collapsed into my Obscure Object, which undoubtedly caused some creative complications, and I'm not exactly willing to speak further on that at this moment.)

But a word (or many) about writing + me. I don't know when it began; it has simply always been there. It started full-force circa the age of 12 with highly improbably-set "novels" that I never finished. Then entered the journals, all but one of which are still hiding out in my closet, that captured an unbelievable amount of daily- though never mundane- details. [I forget the simplest things, but my memory is tightly wound and I never forget the things I want to remember.] Somewhere in the last two years of high school, I discovered blogging. My first blog (still alive, at times completely embarrassing, but ultimately totally entertaining- maybe just for me) carries on the tradition of the paper journals: detail after detail after detail. Some coding exists in place of real names, and I confess that I can't decipher all of it. When LiveJournal became "all the rage," I got one. Then a second. Then a third. Over the last eight years, I've opened at least 6 LiveJournals; today just three remain; one is infrequently updated.

Something happened in my transition from blogging to LJ-ing. I lost a part of my writer's voice in the shuffle. It took a couple of years for me to realize this, but I never did anything about it until two summers ago. I then returned to my original blog and brought a modified voice to it: that of someone who had learned the fine art of ambiguity.

But again, something was off. I needed that sensationalized clean slate, so I started fresh with a new blogspot (hello, clean slate). After a significant transfer of posts, the writing started to come back to me. The ambiguity hit a new all-time high, and the coding began again. I took this blog underground last winter or spring, but have since gone "live" once more. I'm still not sure how I feel about that, but I was tired of being undercover. I was tired of letting loose only to pull everything back in.

You can trace all of this ambiguity and vagueness to my Obscure Object- which, admittedly, has taken on a few different forms over the last 10 years. But this is another story for another (blog)post.

Maybe I don't need my Obscure Object-corrupted muse. I generally don't believe that I have one, and truthfully, I'm currently using it as an excuse for my lack of word-flow. Or maybe this is just a concrete representation of how much has changed in my life from this point one, two, even three years ago ----> to how my life exists today. Maybe I need to make more mix cds because I tell the best stories with other people's music and words. Maybe none of this makes sense.

Years ago, at what I now realize was an incredibly important and life-shaping proverbial fork-in-the-road, I wrote this: "...because everything here has been so 'almost.'"

It's true: almost.