Friday, October 22, 2010

Stories In My Head

My mind is constantly on. My mind is constantly thinking. My mind is constantly planning and preparing and wondering and worrying. But when it’s not doing those things, my mind is daydreaming. I daydream all the time. And I’ve been doing it as long as I can remember. I daydream whenever I have spare moment. Whenever those annoying voices will shut up about where to go/what to do/how to get things done, they are telling me stories.

Hold up. Now I sound crazy. “They” are not telling me stories. I am telling me stories. Stories to entertain myself, you see? And there are just so many stories inside my head.

I love long car-rides, that’s the best story time. Running is ok, but for some reason the stories are more real and less good when I’m running (I blame it on the alive in-the-moment-ness of running. You can’t quite daydream yourself elsewhere). Right before falling asleep is good too. I love those moments between awake and asleep, when the stories start as my own but then morph into their own entities when they go from daydreams to real dreams. Those make for the best stories. 

I’m not saying the stories in my head are good. They’re mostly not. They’re mostly bits and pieces of stories, episodes of epic adventures where the who/what/where/when/why doesn’t need to be explained because like I said, they’re stories to myself so I already know all that.

Sometimes the stories are persistent. They insist on being dwelled upon. I try to read a book, and the stories invade and push themselves in, Listen to me! Think about me! they insist.

Maybe this means I should write those stories down? But I really don’t think I could do that. They’re really really silly. They all star me of course (why would myself tell myself stories about other people?), I doubt they'd be interesting to anyone else.

But perhaps I should give them more consideration…

Since becoming a blogger I suppose that gives me a teensy-weensy bit street-cred as a writer. (Silly that just writing something every day could remotely qualify me as someone with something worth saying, right?) But I wouldn’t say that I am a Writer, I respect writers far too much to claim that title so easily. If I’m a writer and Leo Tolstoy was a writer, does that make us the same? No. I don’t believe so. All we have in common is that we put words to paper (and not even real paper in my case!). But I am a person who writes. A person who likes to write. A person who some day would like to be a writer....

But for now I'll keep the stories in my head.