30

Long story short. I’m dragging laundry up the stairs at 10:30 p.m. while the rest of my house is asleep. I have a thought about this birthday of mine, set down the laundry and head to the computer. Between frigging with the computer, attempting to locate my blog (similar to loosing your car in a parking lot? maybe), and loosing two attempted entries. I have no clue what I was going to say. But I guess that is it.

Write shit down, because you are going to forget everything.

I am covered in Post-Its of various colors, and have cryptic notes scrawled on both hands and up one forearm. While in the aisle at Target today, I wrote down the date of an appointment with a half-inked pen on the cover of my checkbook (while watching my son systematically pull the knobs off all of the cute kid’s humidifiers, probably positioning them all as little humidifier animal penises). I went to Target to get a humidifier, but left with a headache, a coffee, and some paper towels. I hadn’t written it down. I remembered thirty minutes into my drive home. Shit.

But that is it. If we don’t write it down, it’s gone. The subtext to this post is my constant fixation on language and text and how we use it and Are we all going to die in some textless, glam-ignorance-fueled apocalypse? A fear that is fanned by the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords among other things. Regardless of the motive or influence that drove the shooter, language is powerful; the sooner we recognize that we are responsible for what comes out of our mouths, pens, and keyboards, the sooner we can get about this growing up business.