I’ve missed typing. Specifically, I’ve missed typing on a blank page. I type a lot on Twitter every day – something like 100 tweets a day – but I miss the feeling of opening up a blog and just throwing word after word with reckless abandon. As I write this I’m thinking, wow, there’s so much space. Tweeting has been a delightful adventure for me these past few years, but it’s also quite constrained, in ways that I don’t always notice moment by moment. Yesterday I posted a thread that was made entirely out of images from Pinterest, and that felt really nourishing for me – just to escape the constraint of feeling like I have to express myself in 240 character chunks or less. How many characters have I spent in this chunk of text so far? 744! And I can just keep going! Glorious. I absolutely love it. I almost can’t believe how long it’s been since I last wrote one of these.

But that’s not true – I can believe it. Because I’ve been doing this for 20 years now. Writing. Posting. Publishing. Writing some more. Writing on many different platforms. Texting. Texting friends. Texting myself. Arguing with people. Facebook status essays. Forum posts. Writing in paper notebooks. When I step away from it all for a little bit, it’s funny to observe just what a prolific and voluminous person I am. I can go on and on and on. “Can he go on indefinitely?” I must’ve wondered at some point. And I think the answer to that is – if I stick to one particular medium, one particular frame for too long, I do start to get weary, which is why I part of why I stepped away from this particular blog for some time – but as long as I periodically switch mediums, as long as I notice when I’m not having as much fun, and then ask myself “well, what would be more fun?” – then I can keep going until I’m dead.

I’m very happy about this. At 31 years of age, I have developed a clarity that I desperately wished for when I was 16, 18, 22, 25. I have been very blessed on multiple fronts, but I also sure as hell put in a lot of fucking work into getting myself those blessings. It’s absolutely true that chance favours the prepared mind. And you have to be willing to do the work when opportunity comes knocking on your door. It’s been fascinating for me to get to spend lots of time with other people’s thoughts, because I’ve now seen first-hand how many people actually disregard opportunity when it shows up. People sometimes ask for something, and then ignore you when you offer to give it to them, straight up, no strings attached! It’s fascinating to witness and it’s another reminder that humans are wonderfully, tediously complicated beings with all sorts of internal contradictions, which you can spend your whole life trying to unravel only to find yourself thoroughly blanketed in infinite tendrils of thought and time.

It’s all good fun. It’s all part of the game, the great cosmic play, the joy and despair of being a human being. This is it, man. The pursuit, the process, the endeavour, the ordeal. This is who we are and this is what we do. Not everybody does the exact same thing. Certainly, being an ultra-prolific writer of words is maybe roughly about as rare as being a person who runs ultra-marathons. (“Why did you even invent ultra-marathons?!” I want to joke. But I get it even as I don’t get it. Putting one foot in front of another, for an ultra-marathoner, is an act of worship and an act of discovery, just as putting one word after another is for me.)

This post is shaping up to have “renewal of vows” energy, a reminder to myself that no matter what else is going on in my life – however old I get, however much money I make or lose, whatever people think of me, I will always love the act of tapping on a keyboard and getting words out of me, onto a screen. And maybe someday in our lifetime there will be technology that’s even more amazing than typing, maybe one day we can simply think words into existence. And maybe we can even think and imagine visuals – I’ve slowly begun to develop an increased interest in visual aesthetics over the years. Which is cool. But the point is! For the time being, I expect that writing will continue to be a huge part of my life, indefinitely. And I love this for myself, I love that I’ve figured this out about me. I vaguely remember having a conversation with my old boss back when I was around 25, and even then it was pretty clear to both of us that writing was something very central to my life. I mean, there’s no doubt about this, is there? This 1000wordvomits project wouldn’t be possible if writing wasn’t something I was incredibly obsessed about. Would it? Is there anything else I could do 1000×1000 of? I can imagine maybe doing 1,000 doodles, but a doodle would be the equivalent of maybe 10-20 words, not 1,000. Maybe writing a song counts as being roughly as challenging as writing a thousand words. I could see myself writing 100 songs as a challenge, maybe, but 1,000 songs seems like something beyond me. I mean, now that I’m thinking about it, it doesn’t seem entirely out of the realm of possibility, but I would definitely not commit to 1,000 songs. I’d do 100 first and see how that felt. And part of why I felt comfortable committing to 1,000 wordvomits was that I knew that I wanted to do it. It’s just the beginning for me. I am going to write much, much more. I might switch to writing fiction. I might write screenplays. I’ll just write and write and write because writing is what I do.