The Scrivener's Jest

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.

I started writing for two reasons. The first was spite.

I was nine years old and in the fourth grade. My childhood was less than stable and for that year I was living with my mother and sister on a farm in Elk River. We didn't own the farm. There was some arrangement between my mother and the wealthy family employing her. She took care of the farm while they were gone for a year, and so we lived there. Moving wasn't really a shock for me at that point. By the time I was in the fourth grade,I had already been in at least 5 different schools.

I loved to read, though. Maybe because books were constant when nothing else was. When I very young, we had a collection of books from the '50s that I would “read” which mostly meant looking at the pictures or memorizing words to pretend I could read. I even had the old Dick and Jane primers, and eventually I did actually learn to read that way. I was a bit of a puzzle in kindergarten, or so I was told. The teachers felt I was academically advanced but socially delayed. This, the reoccurring theme of my life.

I digress, I was speaking of spite and the fourth grade. Mostly, I am talking about my language arts teacher whose name I honestly don't remember. I think, in my youth, I blotted her out of my memory in a fit of righteous anger. I am many things, but I am certainly no saint. My public school career is spotty in many ways, and my hatred of busy work and pointless home work was evident from my earliest days. I don't cheat, though.

Actually, I cheated once. I cheated on a science test in the second grade. I kept transposing the numbers in the temperature of a normal human body, 98.6 become 96.8 over and over. I became paranoid I was going to get it wrong, so I wrote the number on a piece of paper and put it in my desk in such a way that I could see it when I dropped a pencil. I then dropped my pencil and checked my answer. I didn't even need the paper. This was my one transgression.

Don't get me wrong. There was plenty of work I didn't do. There was plenty of times that teachers and I did not see eye-to-eye, but I didn't cheat. To be honest, I didn't really care enough to cheat. I let others cheat off me all the time. If it made their lives easier, why not? I wasn't invested in their learning. I wasn't there to get good grades. I wasn't even there to make friends. I liked school for the libraries and the computers. I liked the clean halls and silent spaces that were escapes from my daily life. I wasn't there for them. I was there for me.

I was nine years old, and I was excited. I wrote a story for school. I wrote a Choose Your Own Adventure story. I had been telling stories my entire life, but until then the stories had been for me. My imaginary worlds were internal creations. I had never thought or considered that I could write them down like others did. It was a sort of magic, and I was so proud of what I written. I wish I still had that story, but she never gave it back. That language arts teacher with the smug smile, the hair that reeked of perm solution, and makeup that was out of date before the dawn of the Korean war, looked down at me and told me that I must have copied the story. I didn't even know how to react to the accusation. I was angry, but not in a way that made sense to me then. I didn't understand what it meant to mourn. She took my creation and she killed it, but I was still too young to have a way to express that. I did eventually cry at home in my room. I sobbed until I was sick. I was crying and angry, and I still couldn't make sense of it. She called me a liar and cheat and threw it away. I learned my lesson. I never gave her anything I cared about again. I remember nothing of her class. I will never forget that moment, though.

I kept writing. I kept writing because fuck her. These were my words and my stories. I didn't need her to tell me I could write them. I didn't need her to approve or pat me on the head. She may have thrown that story away, but I would write ten thousand more. I would revel in them, and so I did. Never underestimate the righteous rage of a child with stories dancing in his head. And to my false accuser, the nemesis of my nine-year-old self, who is probably long dead and gone, I offer nothing.

I don't even remember your name.