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Ramshackle Musehouse
Notes on Developing Ideas for Nonfiction: Denver, Co, 4/4/2022
© 2022 James LaFond
JUL/4/22
“Since you have the eye problem, why not create audio content? For every reader there is a hundred listeners and a thousand viewers. A lot of people are out there making a lot of money with much less, and much worse content. Why not bring that voice whispering in the wilderness into the town square?”
-Vaxx Zombie De Gaule
“You should be on tictok. Look at this—these are people advertising someone else’s product for free…. Ah, not with that piece of shit phone.”
-Tony from Texas
The fight stuff is easy. If I was still writing on boxing, I could have isolated two styles of sparring I did with young Zeer yesterday and written two articles on it.
Well, the audio stuff I will not do, unless an interviewer does half the work or more for three reasons:
-1. I am not a good speaker and have no idea how to pronounce many of the words I write with. I learned to read and think in utter silence, alone between the pages that were my wonderfilled home.
-2. Talking blows my eye up as surely as getting hit in the head. I have even found that most of the negative effect that alcohol has on the eye, is when I drink enough to really get gabbing and the booze deadens the immediate pain of talking and then I wake up with an eye seizure. If I get hammered while listening to an audiobook, I don’t get the negative effect. There is also the fact that I am technologically averse to the point of becoming completely exhausted within a minute of trying to solve any problem, from how to use a TV remote to dealing with these computers. So, I would be dependent on a third party, and most [2] such recordings of my ideas have been withheld or withdrawn from public discourse by the parties recording them:
-Fatherland [2 hours]
-Carbon Mike [8 hours]
-Rusty [20 plus hours]
-Incognegro [10 and more hours]
-Richard [8 to 10 hours]
-Dennis Dale [6 or so hours]
That is 55 to 60 hours or work, not fun, but an onerous grind for which my weak will and voice are ill-suited, down the memory hole. I write a novel in 20 to 60 hours depending on the length. What a waste this all was, considering that I have some 20 books in process and others baying insanely at the closing door, some of which will never be completed.
-3. I can’t think out loud. This makes me a terrible instructor in fighting and a worse corner man. I have never developed a thought concerning a subject while discussing that subject, ever. I can run my mouth about something I know, but cannot brain storm at all. By normal human standards of interaction, I am quite stupid. I would have made a pathetic Roman.
I will expand:
I have written hundreds and perhaps thousands of articles and dozens of books based on conversations in which I lagged and the person I was speaking with expanded the conversation into an inquiry. If I am not able to take a thought I have already developed while writing and insert it into the conversation, this failure to develop a thought in conversation will drive me to write about it. My very inability to think on my feet while running my mouth has driven me to right in order to stave off insanity. I do not like to write, I have to.
I think in silence, utter and total silence, visualizing person’s usually in profile, as if I am walking next to them, or actions, or empty ancient ruins, a garden, a mountain stream, wastes under a grey storm sky, and such like. In these imaginary precincts my muses repeat their statements and questions, and I think back in silence. I have dozen of muses, Zeer here being a new one, Jon Grace as well, having just had the pleasure of speaking with him in person.
My writing is done silently in my head in the following contexts, from the most to least productive:
First, the Major Method
-0. Accounting for over half of my nonfiction and over 90% of my fiction are ideas, conversations and imagined actions developed in this process, stabbing these keys with my right middle finger and my left index finger... in a circular pattern I now note, as the search for letters tends to have a finger circling in the center of the key board of center to the left. This activity induces a trance, which is where most of my thinking occurs.
Secondly, the Minor methods
-1. While doing manual labor, from ditching, to wood cutting, to berry picking and stocking shelves
-2. While walking
-3. While waiting and observing as a passenger on a train, bus, car or truck
-4. While standing alone, drinking coffee or alcohol and burglarizing other folk’s conversations in a bar or other social setting
-5. While waiting on my feet at train platforms or bus stops
-6. While sitting in the bathtub—the shower does not work
-7. While lying on my back with a woman’s head on my chest. Since my old ass has lost most of the mares and the stable is generally empty, this is no longer a thing. However, if I enjoyed the company of ladies as regularly as I bathed, and when I did, this is just as productive as the bath tub.
-8. While listening to or viewing a documentary, a news cast or a movie, usually one with glaring inaccuracies, which is to say over 90%. This is one reason why I avoid such content as it drives me to write about the things that are not important to me, which are by definition very important to normal humans.
-9. While waiting in a seated position, like in a doctor’s office or church
All of the above activities conducted in the muse house of the mind [1] occur in silence, silence on my part, though often in the company of noise, like the sound of Zeer’s water purification vat to my left, and the refrigerator that just kicked on to my right.
Perhaps, having entered life as a retard and lived it as either a loser or a loner as I learned to navigate it’s hostile precincts and pathways, has made me a secret thinker of sorts. I think many things that will never be written. Indeed, my fiction is a way to squeeze out more of my criminal thoughts and relieve the pressure of blooming insanity.
My thoughts, values, beliefs, suspicions and opinions have been under constant attack and/or under pressure of negation by almost every person I have ever known for my entire life.
Why in this consigned Hell, would a weirdo such as I ever think out loud?
Notes
-1. Museum is Greek for muse-house.
-2. That is those which were not recorded by Lynn or Mister Grey
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