A Disciple of Writing

 After a lifetime of fancying myself a writer, today I start the discipline of writing.  I am going to hold myself to writing at least one page a day.  It can be anything, but it will be on this template and it will at least have a single word on the second page.  Each one will be posted to a blog and the good ones will be worked on and the bad ones will be left behind.  I am trying to think of it as a survival of the fittest for my ideas, and I need a robust and diverse population to find and pluck out the truly good ideas.

We, as thinking and perceiving creatures, have to make a lot of assumptions about the world.  I assume water will be wet if I touch it.  I take that for granted and I don’t have to touch every lake to confirm it isn’t a very convincing, though completely solid, simulacrum of a liquid.  Some assumptions are very nearly inborn and some come with time.  Often enough, our assumptions are right enough that we go on living; I assume that food at the store is properly labeled, I don’t have each package chemically analyzed.

But what if I was wrong to trust that assumption?  Counterfactual: Diet Coke paid off someone somewhere and ten percent of their bottles are just filled with whatever is around.  If that’s the case, I don’t seem to be any worse off for it.  If I become aware of that information, I can make different decisions going forward.  If I had a history of intermittent gastrointestinal distress, perhaps I now have a lead of a cause to something with the unknown variable that seemed completely random.  

Three years ago, I got married.  Lovel, my partner, is a dude.  So am I.  (1)  Saying that in 2021 as if it was some sort of revelation or plot point and that feeling so fake speaks to the progress we have made as a society, despite what the Trump years may have made us think.  Gay marriage moved from a taboo ratings grabber on TV in the 90s to the wedge issue in the nation is 2004 to, among the vast, vast majority of the nation, a non-issue.  (2).  By 2018, when we sent out our wedding invitations, quite a few went out to people that I had grown up hearing react to the very notion of gay people with literal disgust.  

A small part of my mind worried there would be a large contingent of people from my past that might send well wishes, but would prefer not to attend a same-sex wedding.  Part of me was afraid that, despite the fact that I had come out to them twenty years prior and they had met Lovel, when the rubber met the road, when it really mattered, they would wish us well but just couldn’t participate.  

Now, imagine a scientist running the famed double slit experiment (3), the particle is fired and hits the detector and there is a wave pattern.  Next, the scientist runs it again, but this time they intervene at some point to measure the speed or position of that particle.  Now, this measured particle hits the detector at one spot.  The act of measurement changed the outcome, forced the probabilities to have a definition and not the undefined properties they had without measurement.

There is a whole pop mythos around this concept of quantum effects.  A guru telling you that you can will any outcome, that the world is set by your intention, that you can direct that particle to the one spot you want it.  But we know, good reader, that we have to interact with something to observe it.  Example, we have to bounce a photon off it that we can interpret when it gets back to our eye or the most technical equipment.  Observing it has as much physical reality as pushing someone over midrace; no matter how quickly that runner recovers, neither one will let you know how the race would have ended without the intervention.

I trusted that my guests would attend my wedding and the vast majority did, it confirmed the change I expected from the historical state.  But it also disrupted things.  For some, it was their first same-sex wedding.  The state of acceptance was mushy, unsure, the readings were all over the map, but the observation that was the wedding was certain, you were there or you were not.  The ones who the detector registered on the right side got a party and those who didn’t were out living their lives.

So all of that is to say that I am trying to develop a discipline of writing to create that intervention and see where I am on my way through the race.  I want to be a person that writes every day and for too long I have waited for the person to emerge.  I need to take a measurement and commit to a trajectory.  I need to do the writing to be the writer, that is the measured particle, it is going to be different, but it’s going to be something.  I’ll never be a writer without provably writing something, and the discipline of writing something for the sake of writing will make me the writer I want to be.

This puts me solidly on page two, so I am going to wrap this up.  This is posted somewhere, so there might be an audience.  If so, welcome and I think it will get better from here.

(1) I probably identify more precisely as a mostly masculine presenting genderqueer/non-binary.  Develop later.

(2) The continual fall back of the culture war should be ignored and attention spent on the reactionary wave coming behind them.  Develop later.

(3) Look it up, not my main point.