Static, Shiny Things and Semi-Coherent Sentences
Well...
I created a blog.
(Intrusive thoughts win again)
Making a blog is something I’ve thought about doing 101 times, but never quite mustered up the confidence to actually create.
I’ve always enjoyed writing and poetry, just never been very good at it...at least in the academic sense of things. I like to write; I write about midnight shenanigans, the things that make me laugh and cry, those thoughts I ponder at 2:27am, my childhood wonders, and the utterly random shit that pops into my head while taking a shower and washing between my toes.
That said, after years of being told I can't spell, that I have poor grammar, and that I sprinkle in punctuation like I’m seasoning a steak, I kind of lost the desire to share anything at all...
I’ll spend hours reading and rewriting everything, stressing over accidentally writing good instead of could or our instead of hour (which let’s be real, the words sound exactly the same, unless you’re one of those hhhour people, haha). Then just when I think I’ve finally polished something enough to share, it’s found littered with errors anyway. Somewhere along the way, I lost the joy of writing and the courage to share my poetry, spaztastic thoughts and lifelong ponderments.
Although today, when I went on a walk in the warm overcast weather, I tripped over my two left feet while picking up a shiny washer off the ground (for my crow box, think shiny squirrel things), and it just sort of dawned on me… who the flucknuggets actually cares? (If you do care about my grammatical struggles, you might want to skedaddle or grab some popcorn and buckle up.)
If Dr. Seuss can write Green Eggs and Ham using only 50 different words, surely someone can theoretically enjoy my Picasso of literature ... if you're lucky, you'll end up with a little Dali and Pollock too. Ever since playing the game Masterpiece as a kid, I’ve admired Nighthawks by Edward Hopper (think realism), but that’s just not how I write, and after 20+ years, I’ve finally realized it's not going to happen…and maybe, finally, I’m okay with that.
I can’t promise this will actually turn into anything, after all, I’ve never managed to keep a journal to save my life. Starting something courageous is one thing, keeping the courage to keep going is another. But what I can promise is that whatever ends up here will be a smattering of Shelby rambles, sprinkled with laughter, tears, and enough typos to send an editor into a full blown panic attack.
So keep stopping by for some of those meaningless moments that, somehow over time, ended up meaning just about everything. You know, like the smell of rain on hot asphalt, playing outside until the streetlights came on, daydreaming while listening to radio static, poetry about love, life, and loss… or the really important things, like how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, my SAT score and whatever else my ADHD decides to throw on the table in the middle of my 1:1 with my boss.
If your heart (and pocket) likes to collect tiny, pointless treasures like mine does, then we might both just get a kick out of it after all.
This will be for the good kind of absolute nothing, the unimportant, yet strangely important moments we all seem to share. The memories that never asked to matter, but somehow always did and the soft static humming in the background of the moments we almost missed, those meaningless moments: the little things that meant everything, after all.
Shelby Prewett
