What Happens When You Try to Become a Writer in a Very Weird Year?

One man’s monthly journey from idiot to an idiot who writes.

Image by Comfreak from Pixabay

It was about this time last year, I wrote down three goals for 2020. I wrote them on the big wall in our kitchen we painted with blackboard paint the previous summer. The wall has a little cubby hole where we store chalk and erasers. Above the cubby hole it reads:

Goals 2020:

1. Travel
2. Make friends
3. Write

Seemed reasonable at the time, but I’ve since learned if you want to make a year laugh, tell it your resolutions. A blur of months passed, alternating at either lightning or molasses speed, and now I’m sipping coffee and looking at 2021 on my phone’s calendar wondering what just happened.

Time is a strange construct. Our quotidian familiarity with it suggests it’s absolute, a consistently reliable metric, but it is not consistent and it’s more dimension than metric. We’re relatively certain it’s relative. It might be cyclical in a post-Mayan, post-Nietzsche kind of way, assuming there’s post anything in non-linearity. We travel through it at varying speeds and theoretically it can flow backward if it avoids the arrows of outrageous causation. It operates like clockwork as long as we…