The Scrivener's Jest

There is a strange horror to cacophony. Once it begins, it offers a sort of effortless conundrum: join in or stay silent. Whatever you choose doesn't matter. Requiring nothing, it feeds and builds on those trapped within it. Lonely silences, easily broken, cannot quell it while attempts to overwhelm it only add to its power.

You can scream and shout. You can feel your voice in your head, but the moment it leaves your mouth it disappears into the static haze of a million voices more. A thing of chaos, the cacophony swims through us like a storm, enforcing silence through endless noise.

“And mine eyes fell upon the countenance of the man, and his countenance was wan with terror. And, hurriedly, he raised his head from his hand, and stood forth upon the rock, and listened. But there was no voice throughout the vast illimitable desert, and the characters upon the rock were SILENCE. And the man shuddered, and turned his face away, and fled afar off, and I beheld him no more.”

— Silence – A Fable by Edgar Allen Poe

This is the curse of our time. We bury ourselves in image and in text. I consume multitudes daily, and it is never enough. I would devour you, just to hear your voice, to know you in the precious silence of a moment.

We cannot stop the cacophony. It has raged since we first built settlements on the plains of this world, and it only gets louder as time goes on. All I can do is pull you close in the raging storm and whisper in your ear, “We are still here.”

They say the night shift kills you slowly.

Gods, I miss it.

I miss the midnight, the empty offices, and the silence. The world abandoned save for the few, the ghosts. We haunted the backrooms and the alleyways, eschewed the clubs and bars where the remnants of the living clung to the bright lights of day. We did our work, invisible to everyone else; and as the sun, we faded away.

Perfection.

I did a lot of night work in my younger days. I was a delivery driver, security officer, data center tech. I even had a gig as an overnight hotel worker which meant I did a little of everything from cleaning, to security, to driving the hotel transport, to running odd things to rooms in the middle of the night.

It becomes a world unto itself, and that is the crux of the problem. The death the night shift brings is not in the work but in the dissonance. I never wanted to come back. I wanted to stay in the night, but the realities of our world require the day. Thus, torn between two worlds, we dissolve.

This unfortunate reality, a lesson, in so many ways.

#craft #tech

I am moving in. I've had this account for a while. I like what Matt is doing and wanted support the work, but I mostly self-host. I didn't really know what I wanted to do with this space. I got the account and tried a few short-lived iterations. Nothing really stuck, so I just kept the account on the back burner.

Last year, I decided to start focusing on writing again. I had taken a break after grad school. Then the pandemic hit and things kept snowballing. Suddenly, it had been years, and I was drowning in my own silence. I started The Scrivener's Jest as a jest. I mean how could I not? We are living in the midst of insanity. Why not write about it? Think about it for just a moment: The vast joke that is our serious state. People starving in a country that throws away nearly half of its food. A tragedy, for sure, but so much more the farce.

So, I self-hosted a Ghost site. The writing came in fits and starts, but it wasn't really working for me. That is when I decided to move, and here I am. I think moving here will be good. It offers an aesthetic I like and an ethos I can get behind. I built this site as a space apart and this is a good spot for that. I don't plan to do a lot of posts like these unless they are more targeted to discussions of craft. This site is a creative exercise focused on creative work, and I intend to keep it that way.

My About will give you a feel for what I do. Right now, I am planning to focus on essays, short stories, flash fiction, and poetry. That is my bread-and-butter as a writer. The content and topics will vary. I mostly write for adults or, more to the point, people old enough to know that growing old isn't the same as growing up. Expect content to match.

And that, reader, is that. Your humble scribe has dragged his lonely desk into the room. He has pulled out his pens and inks and will soon (he hopes) set to work.

In retrospect, attempting to set a pattern so close to a whole series of chaotic events was probably a mistake.

That said, I continue to struggle my way forward. That, dear friends, is all we can do. It is enough, for now.

If you get up and you try, know that you are not alone. I am cheering for you. I am cheering for us all.

Until next time!

Dark fog, obscures the trail, Cross quotidian domains More banal than mundane. I try and make my way, A path of paper and ink. I write, then fall, then fail Wake up, bloody and sore, Cold flesh on a hard floor. Staggered and rough, But alive. So I pick up my pen And start. Again.

It is easy to list the miseries, To call down the sky For every wrong committed. Repetition is amplification Even when you weep. It is okay to step away Before you break.

So here, a moment of quiet. Filled with strange texts And random memories, For Poets are more than The world's “legislators” They are also its jesters And its storytellers.

I offer no solution or salvation In my bag of tricks Only allegory and fiction, Fantasy and desire, Wonder and hope. It is all that I have, But I am happy to share.

The thing about an ending is that it is always constructed. It never happens naturally. There is no moment where everything just stops. Even in the far distant future, long after you and I and every one and every thing else has faded into the dark there is still eternity ahead even if that eternity is just dust and darkness. No, there is no natural end to anything. You have to build the ending.

Perhaps, then, it is that vastness that we seek to allay. The sublime terror of the infinity stretching beyond us and our imagining is more than we dare face. It so much easier to craft an end in an increment be it an hour, a day, a month, or even a year. We mark them off as indicators of meaning because, to us, they are.

This, then, is my ending. A year-end requiem for a year that has often had more dark than light. There are no screaming crowds here. There are no bands nor banners. Only me, such that I am, writing away in the quiet of my study. In this requiem, I offer you, my reader, only this small reminder. The struggles of this year are now a memory, constructed and built within your mind. You are the author of their construction and the arbiter of their translation. Never forget your power here.

This has been a long year. We leave older and wiser, maybe a lot more tired than we were, but nevertheless we leave this year. We write its ending in the stone tablets of our time and step forward into a daunting unknown. We are the heroes of this tale even if we feel unready and unsteady. There is so much more to do, but the year is done. The next adventures lies beyond the cover of this particular book. There is only the end to write. What stories shall we tell of this time? What tales remain? What will we be in this year?

This was the year this site was born. It is quiet here. I haven't pushed it much. I am okay with that. I wanted a place to post the silly, odd, and sometimes pretentious things that I write. I want to do more. That is my ending – the memory of beginning.

Now, tell me yours.

Who will you sacrifice for your comfortable life?

Whose pain and suffering is worth the extra square footage? Whose child should die so that you can go out to dinner? Your new car cost and arm and leg, but its not yours so who cares?

Go ahead and blame the system. You're just a cog in the infernal machine. You poor forgotten soul growing fat on the screams of the dying. How nice that you don't have to hear them when you're hidden behind a computer screen. You don't kill with bullets and blades, you're too much of a coward for that. No, you cut down millions with every curve of the graph. This is your world. A hell where profit versus loss means more than life versus death.

When you trap people in a system where they are devoured by a machine, do not be surprised when they cheer the demise of the operators.

I am a technologist by trade. I grew up in the midst of the digital revolution when the PC was still something new and magical.

I guess for me it still is. I love how this concoction of plastic and metal can create worlds, link people across vast distances, and provide opportunities for art and knowledge to grow. I missed that memo where we were told to only use these cool and creative tools in “appropriate and approved” ways. I don't think I ever did. It helps that I was just poor enough to have to build most things myself but with enough access to resources to still adequately build those things. That is a narrow band of people, indeed, served more by luck and circumstance than talent and work, I assure you. For most of my life, my tech was always a few years (sometimes more) out of date, but it was mine.

I am a writer by practice. It is stupidly hard for me to say that, and it shouldn't be. I've been writing for most of my life. If technology is my blood, writing is my soul. The two are inseparable for me, really.

And yet, I haven't really written in a long time. That is not a complete truth, I suppose. In one sense, I have been writing. I wrote a dissertation. I wrote papers, and articles, and presentations. I still do. I like writing those things. I am good at writing those things. I was good enough to finish what I started, get the big title and that sense of accomplishment. I haven't written a short story in years, though. My poems—the reason I went back to school in the first place—have became party tricks rolled out to impress colleagues and friends. I haven't submitted so much as a piece of flash fiction since 2020.

So here we go. A step back to the craft. If there was ever a time I needed to come back this is it. I noted in a previous post that I am old man, now. I am. I am old, but I have these words swirling in my head. I have stories and poems to tell, games to write. Some are kind and gentle, others harsh and cruel, some passionate, some reserved, and I want to share them with you. The more I pretend I don't want this, the more time just slips away.

I don't pretend to think this is going to be grand success. In fact, I plan to fail a lot in 2025 – which is probably true for many of us for all sorts of horrible reasons. But hey, if the world is going to burn, we might as well sing.

This is not a deliberately anonymous site. I'm not hiding here. I'm also not explicitly linking my other sites. I removed those links, in fact. This is a site for The Scrivener's Jest, alone.

This is a creative space for me. For that to work, it needs to be separate. I need a space where I can just write without my name, my work, or anything else being front and center. Before you get the wrong idea, I should assure you that I am not anyone important. I am just someone with a lot of interests that often don't gel well on the same site.

Reading an academic commentary or tech review interspersed between poems, short fiction, and creative nonfiction sounds cooler than it ends up being. Trust me on that, I've tried.

So this is my creative workspace. Consider it a messy work in progress. A lot that I do here will be experimental and not all of it (maybe any of it) will be good. I am not sure where any of this is going, but I am curious to follow it along.