Photo by Richard Kelly (sorry about the dust)
The Adventures of Johny Rocko
It’s amazing how much time passes, and a multitude of seemingly incredible ideas come and go, while I write in my head and don’t type a single word.
The key is to jump in. Let the river of writing take you. Your job is to stay afloat and not bash your head against a rock.
With the push-ups, it was a quick minute of exercise that seemed to give me a pass for being my lazy, self-loathing self. The thing I want to do most in my life is write. But my expectations for the final product rarely match up with the resulting writing. And I stare at the raging rapids before me and watch cleverness and intelligence float by, as I ponder jumping in.
I edit myself constantly.
My unedited self would probably be Johny Rocko, a fictional version of me, created to tell the story of my college years. I started keeping diaries when I was little, my first one having a lock and a little baby seal illustrated on the front. In college, I decide to buy a hardback blank book from the University Book Store and a black Sharpie marker, and I wrote on the front “The Adventures of Johny Rocko”. I wrote in it every day for years, embellishing here, lying there, and at times being uncomfortably honest. I thought it would make a great book someday.
And maybe it will, someday, but after many attempts and close to 300 pages, all I manages to create was a confusing, disjointed mess. But that’s kind of what my life was back then, a confusing disjointed mess. It’s been over 25 years.
This little blog experiment is just an exercise to get me to write more, so my writing muscles get stronger, and my fear of jumping in the rapids of creativity will diminish.
