The Shanks

I had a computer science professor in college that constantly chirped the adage "Garbage in, garbage out."  Computers are stupid and do what we tell them, so when we tell them to do dumb things, they oblige.  I've pushed this saying to the outer bounds of what Dr. McClung ever thought possible.  It turns out, nearly any system in life spits out garbage with cartoon smelly lines and flies swirling around when we provide it with half-assedness and stupidity.  My writing habits lately are an example, as is the bulk of the productive things that I'm attempting.

My writing hasn't totally flat-lined, and I'm not suffering from writer's block because I'm still lucid and seeing the world in this patchwork quilt of words and phrases, but some of the phrases are in Tagalog and I can't tell which one starts the damn quilt.  I should change things up and go into editing mode to polish things that I've written and don't presently hate, but I don't want to take an up and coming bit of writing and introduce it booze and women and easy money and sully it before it's prime.  My sentences are running on like a marathoner that picked up smoking.  Premises of pieces are lost like droplets assimilating into the ocean.  I used to be able to know how long to drag on a sentence, how many flowing phrases to string together before punctuating it all with a little five word staccato.  Now words are piling in before periods as if they were some sort of horrific train accident moving from right to left.

Of course this all assumes that I had a manner of swagger with a pen that may not have existed in the first place.  A slump isn't a slump if it's normal.  As with all things I will persist, head down, crooked jaw clenched in concentration.  I will fight the urge to backspace all of these words out of existence because if I can't stare down my garbage writing in the mirror and pluck out the edible bits like some sort of homeless author then I won't get through the winter.  And the humble writer has no conclusion so he merely stops writing for now.