I seek the man known as Power Of The White, for I wish to destroy him.
One of my English teachers once proposed a phrase for the overwhelming sense of disheartenment and dismay that fills the soul when faced with an expansive mass of clean paper in front of one; he called it the Power Of The White. This has stuck with me over all my many years of creating stuff, both in academic and personal fields, and has neatly transitioned its way into the digital world in the form of these huge white HTML boxes with nothing in them, ostensibly to be used for typing journal entries. In reality, however, it turns out their function is to sit there looking friggin' imposing, just like the pristine sheet o' paper. There it sits, all huge and monolithic, mocking me.
C'mon, punk, says the Power Of The White. You wanna have a go at me? Let's go, then. If you think you're hard enough. Let's go.
It is in the spirit of rebellion that I do what I am about to do, and have, in fact, been doing for the past two paragraphs. I strike. I mar. I am a defiler of this purity. Inch by inch, line by line, I scratch twists and curls of blackness into the perfect white surface.
I am not always certain that the tradeoff is worth it. I am something like an intellectual Hephestos, a crippled and imperfect vessel working with scarred and blackened letter-shaped tools here in my volcano lair (okay, I made up the bit about the volcano lair) in the hopes that I might someday create a thing of beauty. I like to think that on occasion I have succeeded, despite the broken remnants of total artistic crap I have littering my foundry floor. I am a dirtyer. An impurifier. By this point at my monitor resolution, I have fully etched this white box from top to bottom with blackness. My only hope is that I have created something beautiful by this act of rape, or at the very least, something durable. Something of worth.
Because if I haven't, I might as well have left it white.
In the end, all that I can say is, "I write". I don't really know why. But I do. And when I don't write, I'm not I. And I guess that makes me happy.
Anyway, I just wanted to beat that bastard Power Of The White down a little today. And I think I succeeded. Fuck you, Power Of The White.
Why do rabbits matter so much lately?
C'mon, punk, says the Power Of The White. You wanna have a go at me? Let's go, then. If you think you're hard enough. Let's go.
It is in the spirit of rebellion that I do what I am about to do, and have, in fact, been doing for the past two paragraphs. I strike. I mar. I am a defiler of this purity. Inch by inch, line by line, I scratch twists and curls of blackness into the perfect white surface.
I am not always certain that the tradeoff is worth it. I am something like an intellectual Hephestos, a crippled and imperfect vessel working with scarred and blackened letter-shaped tools here in my volcano lair (okay, I made up the bit about the volcano lair) in the hopes that I might someday create a thing of beauty. I like to think that on occasion I have succeeded, despite the broken remnants of total artistic crap I have littering my foundry floor. I am a dirtyer. An impurifier. By this point at my monitor resolution, I have fully etched this white box from top to bottom with blackness. My only hope is that I have created something beautiful by this act of rape, or at the very least, something durable. Something of worth.
Because if I haven't, I might as well have left it white.
In the end, all that I can say is, "I write". I don't really know why. But I do. And when I don't write, I'm not I. And I guess that makes me happy.
Anyway, I just wanted to beat that bastard Power Of The White down a little today. And I think I succeeded. Fuck you, Power Of The White.
Why do rabbits matter so much lately?