Forgive me Father, for I have Syntaxed.

So, I have been rereading some of my content that I’ve foolishly decided to expose to the world. I noticed something. I make typos. As I started correcting my mistakes, I noticed something else. It takes a long time to correct a blog post. The works that I will be selling, though still as raw, are professionally edited, proofread, and designed. That’s what I have a publisher for. The content on here, and on my social media is raw. It’s unedited, uncut, and Heaven knows it’s unfiltered.

One of my old mentors taught me that good writing reads the way that real people talk. She also said “don’t put out $h!t if you want to succeed!”

I think I’m going to have to find balance somewhere. However, I feel that my reputation as a writer is at stake if I don’t tell a story.

Marge needed TO go the store to buy TWO bananas. When Sally saw Marge was going, Marge said she wanted to go TOO.

Sally realized that THEIR car didn’t have enough gas to get THERE.

Sally told Marge, “We need to hurry and get gas. If we don’t get to the store soon, THEY’RE going to run out of Bananas.”

Moral of the story, I walk a fine line daily between linguistic competence and laziness. I let the professionals figure out the mistakes. I usually proofread, but there are little bugaboos living in my blogs. What I ask of you, my reader is two (heh, sorry) TO accept my writing- Typos and All. You want real writing? You want thought straight from the heart and mind? This is the form it takes. This is raw… I clean up the stuff I publish, sure, but this place— this is my journal. This is me. This is human. It’s ugly. It’s true. These entries are stripped of all effort to conceal what they might be rejected for.

This entry was written halfway yesterday. And then I stopped. Life happened. I had to drop everything including my train of thought with this piece, in order to figure something else out.

Journal, life is messy. It strikes me down, strikes everyone down. We lift each other up, there is joy, moments of euphoria in life. Those are fun. But I think I might have stumbled across something by mistake yesterday. There is a twisted shot of adrenaline and other ‘happy chemicals’ to be had in life. You have to look hard for it, at first. Once you see it and taste the thrill, it’s hard to look at life the same way.

Those close to us. The rollercoaster that we ride together. The ride is only half of the experience. The other half is the expression of emotion between passengers. The ride is engineered by someone who we don’t know. We have no clue what life will bring. We only get to ride life’s coaster once. There are times that we want to throw up. Times we are scared, times we have a crazy amount of oxytocin pumping through our brains. The rails, twists, bends… we all react to them differently. But the people in our car, the emotion packed into the vehicle, travelling down the ride, that is priceless. One thing that most rides have in common is that they work based on gravity. At some point, the car has to be pulled up an incline to reach a high point in the structure, then gravity takes over and brings the car down the happy chemical ridden, puke inducing thrill ride.

I think that the incline is the most important part of the ride. All of the passengers, we have some idea of what is to come, we don’t want to go through with it. Some people give their best effort not to wet themselves, while contemplating the upcoming unknowns. However, there are always fun parts of the coaster. There are always good parts in life. In that important period where the car is ratcheted up the incline though, that is when we get to know the people in our car. We look around. We get faces in our head. Then when the car is released down the tack leading to certain death, we hear screams, crying, sobbing- as we try to associate the sounds of pleading for dear life to the faces in our mind, something unexpected always happens. The crying turns into laughter. “whhyyyy” turns into “Woohoo” … despite all of the fear initially expressed.

If you look at a theme park or carnival you will notice something, they stay in business. People keep coming back! Maybe Humankind is stupid. No, I take that back. Humankind IS stupid. But this rollercoaster-- we all get to ride it once. Though it is scary, maddening, vomit inducing, and at times... pants dampening, life is the biggest thrill ride conceivable. The negative emotion, the noise at the back of the car coming from the people who can’t stop yelling… Maybe it’s just part of the ride. Drown out the people screaming with your laughter. We only get to ride this thing once.