What I Show You When I Write
August 7, 2026
I fuss over my words. I don't always choose them carefully before I hit send, but then again I'm no good in the supermarket either. Came home again with three cans of sweet tea and a box of light bulbs. No bread. I'll do it again next week.
In much the same way I often find myself ruminating over my words after I have shared them. I think about what I was thinking about when I was thinking up those words, how much of that intent and meaning and feeling crossed the liminal gap between my mind and yours, the potential sources of static that nibble away at that intent and meaning and feeling along the transmission lines. I wonder often if you really read the same words that I wrote in the way that one word can stand in for so many other possible ones.
I'm always thinking about how my words can be better. Clearer, more impressive, more moving, more beautiful, better chosen, better ordered, better structured. But even when they come out in a cacophony, they're always mine. Because they're always mine, they always tell you something about me. Some of that is telling on purpose and some of it isn't and everything I write ends up a shuffle of the two. But at least I know I'm being told on.
I have uncharacteristically omitted them here, but I never met an em dash I didn't like, and that's because my mind is always in flight, always questing in new directions, always interjecting new contexts. It can produce some outrageously unwieldy prose but even then it just reflects an unwieldy mind. You should see me teach. Every six or seven minutes or so I have to stop dead, stop talking, pull out a compass, get my bearings, find magnetic north. Linear time is an affectation. Maybe it's actually masking.
I likewise have enjoyed a longstanding and indulgent affair with commas because I am always listening to the rhythm of language, its metre, its heartbeat, and I want you to hear it hum the way I do. I talk shit on Bono for admitting he likes the sound of his own voice all the more harshly because I have the same character flaw. I find myself thinking about how one gets into narrating audiobooks for a living.
Sometimes my writing is overdetailed because I can get lost in the sauce of my special interests; sometimes it is overdetailed because when I have slightly more self-awareness the insecurity kicks in about whether I had anything to say that mattered. Sometimes my writing cuts off abruptly because I get stuck, skip to the next part, and forget to ever go back. Sometimes my writing is smug and condescending because that is how I communicate anger. But more often, at least I hope, it is joyful, because I am an optimistic person, at least I hope.
I think if you consider writing purely as content, as output, it might be possible to get wrapped up in that question I raised earlier, of better, of more, and conclude that having a predictive algorithm do your writing for you will provide a satisfying answer. To a certain kind of careless reader, maybe that kind of writing, that kind of output, even passes some vague and superficial standard of aesthetic muster. But output doesn't communicate anything about a writer other than the absense of one. Output wouldn't allow me to tell you anything about me at all, even when I mean to, especially when I need to.
Something I can promise you is that my words are always mine, always will be mine. That doesn't mean they won't ever betray me. A little betrayal keeps things lively. But writing always has been, always will be, an opportunity to show you a little bit of myself. That's not content, that's not output. That's craft, and craft will never go out of style.
I show you a little bit of everything when I write. There's mirth there and there's wit there, there's pettiness and ego, there's values and vices. There's jokes that didn't land and got worse with every editing pass. There's flashes of brilliance, of sunlight through the trees, that a predictive algorithm and the lightless ghoul of capital who plugged it in can never hope to rival.
See what I did there. I got condescending.