One thousand twenty-eight

Today is July 22nd, 2026 at 12:48 PM pacific coast time.

Marco Dente (Italian, ca. 1486-1527)

After Rosso Fiorentino (Italian,

1494-1540)

Allegory of Death and Fame ("The Skeletons"), ca. 1518-25

Engraving

I begin to write, to exhaust thoughts from my brain and fingers. Compelled to spell it all out. I use two spaces after sentences out of habit. Bear with me.

Distractions poke from every direction in space and time. Dissolving pregnant thoughts. I must write to keep them at bay. To write is to provide safe harbor for thoughts to fully form. Each word coming from brain to my hand to this keyboarded word processor or from hand to pen oto paper, each word is a distraction attached to the previous distracted word. String enough of them together and lo and behold sentences coagulate and thoughts seem formed. Able to see the thoughts, to sound them out from the surface I have the thoughts, in the fullest way i have. Thoughts before writing and in the process of writing seem so fully formed to me until I read them and see that I need to more fully think them and write them.

I am almost 170 words into this. It is now 12:53 pm. at this place I am doing maybe 25 words per minute. Or rather 200 words / 6 minutes = 33 words per minute. That is quite slow. When i am merely copying words from one surface to another without thinking through what the words mean but simply transcribing I can do 90 words per minute. Is it possible to be in such a flow state to have think-scribing approach the spread of trans-scribing. To my own intuition and brainwaves be nothing more or less than another surface of words?

My speed has increased but my thoughts are less interesting. I am now almost exclusively focused on getting to 300 total words and 90 words per minute. What time is it? how many words? It’s 12:56pm now. i am at 317 words. so I did 117 words in 4 minutes. I felt faster but perhaps I got even slower? how is this possible? Torturous ideas of time!

Earlier today I sat at a coffee shop. An espresso was too hot. I started to write with a ballpoint pen. I wrote a word that looked like squirrel. Not a squirrel just the word squirrel. I could no longer spell quarrel. I was adding an and u and i and even an o everywhere. Quite a conundrum. Squirrel is a word.

A few minutes ago short message system distraction landed. My eyes and then hands attended to it. I true distraction with coordination required.

Four hundred twenty seven words prior to these words. Filling out paper money checks and signing them is a lost art. Scratch that. It barely rises to task. I treat anything hard for me to do as art and craft. Obviously this is a “cop out”.

My concerns in my bones lately involve freedom and agency and how much I claim to desire freedom but cannot break habits. My fingers must always move towards production of things others value. What a squirrelish situation. That word, the one right there, is not a word. A word is only a word if another other people you respect say the word and don’t question each other about it.

Because I make up words all the time I clearly only respect myself. Now previous statement indicates why logic is a Problem, with a capital P.

Capital P. capital pea. Captain Pea. The Sea Captain of Pea. The isle of pea is neat to sea in February.

Five hundred sixty-nine words for one dollar. For a dollar you can get a computer to write five hundred thousand sixty-nine thousand words, I bet. I bet you two dollars I can spend a dollar to find out. And will. I am Free To Do So.

It is eight minutes passed one o’clock post meridian in Los Angeles, according to the clock on my computer which is set by some atomic clock controlled by a government. I’ve been told.

Who first thought to cut their hair in stylish ways?

Distractions can emerge from thought itself.

No one should read this essay, it is free association written by someone who is not really free though he wishes to be.

For over twenty minutes I composed these seven hundred thirteen words. Practicing for a test of my humanity. Can I write words without pining away for a computer to do this for me?

No computer would willingly write this essay. Lately I’ve been concerned with using the, that, a, and an less frequently in writing. For someone reason my brain decided the, that, n and an indicate poor writing and thinking. Lacking specificity I resort to determiners, I think such words are called. Maybe this is a good rubric to impress my former English teachers. Where are they now?

I wonder how their lives turned out? They seemed to have already lived lives by the time I wrote the essays they told me to write. My essays received favorable grades. Little did they know how I would learn to write. Writing free association to drive out creeping brain mold of Large Language Models. Insidious little algorithms with tedious attention mechanism weights where the, that, a and an hang around every sentence.

Eight hundred seventy eight words en route to one thousand. Why bother getting to one thousand? I read great writers get to one thousand words per day no matter how poor the writing. I’m lying about that and this and the previous sentence, a sentence filling in for an entry to the word count isn’t a lie, it is filler. That there is the truth, a truth above all truths.

In 1952 I was negative twenty four years old. If you believe in fate then you believe in the truth of that sentence.

Thirty minutes ago I set out to knock cobwebs out of the pink tourniquet inside my skull. Imagine that.

Soon I will turn fifty years old. Nothing willing. That happens without my exerting effort but someone will praise me for time’s doing. Of course, I’m projecting here. Zeus do not strike me down.

One thousand twenty-eight words.