Towel, reporting.
Now I wouldn’t call it THE goal of writing, or of becoming a writer, because—and pardon me while I go on this tangent here, sorry—THE goal has specifically and immutably assigned to it a certain ineffability; such that even if we come to know all or part of it during our many attempts to articulate it, we still cannot articulate it, because it must defy articulation. It’s not that it's some abstract, quasi-religious entity that I’m just trying to sound smart by talking about. Clearly. It’s just that ‘articulation’ is/requires a sort of mental writing process in itself, so just to begin to describe the goal of writing is like figuring out where to begin untying a Gordian knot. It’s just… nevermind.
A goal of writing, a major one, is to sort of improve the usefulness of thought. I mean, if this is not a cliché already, it should be. The harder one is on oneself as a writer, the more often one will find oneself, just in general, making excuses (= Useful Thought, in action (when successful)). Where this comes from is because of the way writers study the behaviors of others and themselves as really and interestingly as they possibly can, in order to like write stories in which folks behave in interestingly natural ways--if anything just for a few You-know-what-I-mean?-type yucks (though the potential profundity or/and severity of this practice at its most masterful probably warrants its own more sober caliber of rationale). And it just happens naturally, then, that as writers hone this meta-awareness, they become aware of the opportunities for practice inherent in situations where they are called to make mundane everyday excuses for themselves. The mundaner the better. Rather than do the normal, irresponsible, American thing and say “my bad,” writers attempt to elucidate their situation. They attempt to win by the same strange, untenable logic that one uses when forgiving oneself for private misdeeds. Should they fail to do so, it simply means they need to keep practicing writing until they are so clearly understood, like w/r/t their internal motives, that their excuse-hearer would never again dare misjudge the writer's “excuse” as having stemmed from anything less than an unfortunately-fundamental truth. This may or may not be plain old stubbornness, but I defy you to convince them otherwise.
Like for instance.
This evening I was on the phone, when my battery, because it was a cell phone that I was talking on, up and died right in the middle of talking. Right when I had just very passionately asked “Why the fuck wouldn’t you want to see Star Trek?” (Which question I only asked so vehemently because I thought I was about to have to defend the honor of a movie whose honor should require no such defense; in the end, though, it was because the girl is waiting to see it with her dad.) I plugged the phone into its charger and turned it back on and redialed my girlfriend’s number and the conversation picked up where it left off. Sure enough, pretty soon, like fifteen minutes in, I had that chemical stress in my bladder that says it's go-time, but I found myself tethered to a spot next to a wall where I couldn’t really reach a toilet. The cord on the charger is, by the way, a kind of terrible not-very-long that keeps my shoulders almost imperceptibly hunched while I'm on the phone, as if there’s a very weak gravity pulling me downward diagonally, so weak in fact that that is what makes it all the more agonizing, if you can see how that would make sense; erstwhile, this needing to pee keeping me focused on my current physical state made both the slightly-agonizing slight-hunching and the needing to pee all the worse. Like a feedback loop of discomfort. Over nothing, I know. But its being over nothing was just another part of what was bad about it! (Don’t be difficult with me, Reader, I always want to say.) Anyway, I almost brought this need-to-pee up to my girlfriend on the phone, but realized I already knew what she would say: put the phone down, Silly, and go pee. To which my automatic, logical retort was and would have been: since it probably has enough charge in it by now to stay alive for a minute or two, I could actually just unplug the phone, carry it with me to the bathroom, go pee, come back, and plug it back in, no interruption needed—presuming she would be okay with my going pee while on the phone with her (N.B. she is cool with it). And this is the choice I should have made. I should have trusted that the phone probably had charged a bit in the fifteen or so tethered minutes that it had taken me to realize I needed to pee, and that this charge was enough to keep the conversation alive until I was able to bring the phone back to its power source. But there was and is still something to resist about this choice of action, just as a human. I know this, because I didn’t do it, even once I‘d thought about the fact that I was thinking about writing about it later; in fact, the moment I'd finished thinking through its perfect logic, my “feeling” about it was a kind of “meh” or “nah” or “no thanks” or “hold on, um, well is it okay if I say no?” So I didn’t do it. I’ve done it before, I know, but this time: Not this time.
And why? What, if anything, was my excuse? Well, in no particular order: because it would hurt at least just slightly a little bit to stoop down and plug the phone back in when I came back from peeing; and because talking/listening while peeing kind of sucks at least somewhat more than peeing while free of distraction; and because peeing while one hand is holding the phone or peeing two-handed with the phone tucked between the ear and shoulder are both somewhere between neutral and unpleasant things to do, whereas peeing by itself is intrinsically sort of pleasant; and because realistically I’d rather just come back from peeing and not have to plug the phone back in so that I may live untethered—whether we’ve hung up or not—and though we may be able to keep speaking in such a manner, I mean though the battery may be that enough-charged, we may nevertheless be interrupted again, and this latter chance seems not even worth even finishing sentences about, it’s that vaguely boring and off-putting. … Seeing it all written out, here, this reasoning seems even more ridiculous and hedonistic than it felt at the time, and even then it felt pretty ridiculous and hedonistic. Alas.
In the end, the thing is, I wasn’t willing to unplug the phone and go into the bathroom with it, and the thing also is, when I really thought about why, this is all that came up. This “reasoning,” as in all the bullshit following the colon, above. And though this might be a terrible case just by itself, it’s nonetheless a bright and shining exemplar of a needless little effort like the kind surreally better writers than I make all the time when they’re climbing inside the heads of their little epiphanically human characters. It’s patently crazy, and it’s the stuff of like pot-circles the world round, but it’s also utterly worth the risk of failure, of sounding vacuously unnatural, of sounding like you’re trying too hard, of sounding High As Fuck, &c. Because when this crazy-ass kind of excuse succeeds, it’s … well, it’s definitely not called an “excuse” anymore. I don’t even know if there’s a good, non-cliché word for it. I guess “poignant” always gets thrown around in Intro workshops about this type of thing, like when it’s so strikingly present in Raymond Carver and Lorrie Moore and other such heartbreakingly widely-known Postmodernists. It’s the This Author Just ‘Gets’ Me factor. It’s the … what writer-types are putting to the test when they pull this type of crap in their day-to-day; it’s their standard “I shouldn’t make this particular choice” mechanism acting less as a mine detector and more as a divining rod. It’s a major goal, but not THE one. Because if it were THE one, what would be the point? Why know the ins and outs of yourself and others like you? Eventually, if we're going to figure everything out, as like a community of intellects, then whatever writers come up with as THE fundamental truth needs to rhyme with whatever physics comes up with as THE fundamental truth, and with whatever philosophy comes up with, and neuroscience, and so on. All I'm saying is there doesn't seem to be much of a consensus as to the nature of being, just by itself, I mean... or, well, nevermind.
BTW: In the end I just held it and went pee when the phonecall was over.