It’s fuckin’ trippy to see your silent influence on the world.
I never really talk about myself, or my life, outside of boxable bits you can easily bite off.1
You gotta understand that from my point of view, I’m just me. Normal, maybe a bit clever and I read faster than normal.
It’s the outside view from inside of me, that’s where the problems start.
It feels, often, like I’m living in a world of fucking retards. Like the lord’s prayer in a dark and unknown house, I ward those things one ought not to think2 off.
I don’t deny them, though.
So you get this.3
Punctuation, diction, timing, rhyming, you do all these things to transfer information through the written word.
You can’t see my face.
You can’t see the lines of my body, if I’m leaning in, if I’m gazing at something in the sky, face half in shadow. But.
You have every character on this screen. The way
they’re
arranged, and how it all flows together to create what you think is my voice in your mind.
Butt
if you come across something like the above, do you trust me?
Do you trust me, Dear Reader?
Are these things intentional, are they accidental-
DO
you trust me?
This is why punctuation, grammar, spelling, spacing, spelling again, word choice, line choice, arrangement, all of this shit
really
fucking matters.
As a writer you have maybe three dozen characters at your disposal without getting fucking cute4 and that is yourself.
You’ve got to fit all of your pain
your love
your wide-eyed wonder
your half-lidded smirking cynicism
your ashed cigarettes
your nights burned in to your soul, street lights reflecting off wet cement like lampreys in water
your screaming aching loss
your oh-so-forgettable-but-must-never-be-forgotten weeping waking wailing wet meat DNA-based fragments of time
in to three dozen symbols.
So, yes, fuck you, fuck your goddamn soul, it fucking matters.
It all goddamn fucking matters.
If you swing a hammer at the fishtank where I’ve kept all my blood and fucking organs, because you’re so fucking scared of getting it wrong, that you’re out to destroy, because you got fucking hurt, so help me god I will strike you the fuck down.
The only way to earn my ire is to run up to defeat and hug it close because you think effort itself won’t throw it back.
If you’re not enjoying yourself when you write, why do you write?
I bet you, yes YOU, reading this right now, could list off five of these, easily. If you can’t, you’re dangerously out of touch with yourself and probably ought to fix that. Or you’re fuckin’ Siddartha idk.
okay so big us: you’re ducttaped (as the reigning regent of english, i now declare this to be a compound word) to a wheel chair and i’m holding your eyelids apart with the fingers of my hands, in your ear, screaming, cajoling, whispering: “DO YOU SEE?”
FIRST MOTHERFUCKER QUOTING UNICODE STANDARDS TO ME GETTIN’ THEIR UNI-ASS CODE-BEAT OR, SOMETHING, FUCKING, YOU KNOW WHAT I GODDAMN MEAN.
okay very real fucking talk, based off the view, open and read rates on my shit, vs. the engagement level, i genuinely think a lot of you are where i would be: “i think i get what’s going on here but i’m not 100 so imma just be quiet because i don’t think imma get yelled at but i’m not certain”. so, in this one instance, i’m just going to clearly state: This essay is about the importance of grammatical conventions in the written word.
Hard agree.