In trying to find something to write about today, I went back through some of the unpublished drafts of things I'd written before thinking maybe I could let myself off easy. I pushed the words around a bit, added some, took things out and....nothing. The essays just lay there on the screen, either pointless or uninteresting or incoherent or all three. Just. Bad. I should probably delete them but I can't quite bring myself to do that. Maybe I need to keep them there, these little failed attempts, to remind me of something. What, exactly, I'm not sure, but I'm sure theres a lesson in them somewhere. Or maybe I'm hoping they will age well. When I was a kid, my best friend once told me that "art ages." If she'd made something she didn't like all that much she would tuck it away for awhile. When she brought it back out, it would usually be better than she remembered. I've tried that. It sometimes works. I also remember a time in 8th grade art class when I was working on a still life. It was terrible. The art teacher, bless him, would let me come in during lunch to work on it. I did, nearly every day, for ages. I kept pounding away at this doomed sketch of some jumbled crap on a table and then one day, suddenly, it changed. I can recall looking at it at the end of lunch period and going "Huh! That actually looks...good." I can recall even better the my art teacher's look of astonishment, and his comment along the lines of "I'd lost hope on that...but now it looks right. Wow." It's something to get your teacher to admit that he'd given up on you but you'd managed to redeem yourself anyways.
I've pretty much given up hope on these old posts that I will never publish, but I'm still not deleting them. Not yet. I never know when I might be able to redeem myself.
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