some good talk.

What do you want to talk about tonight? There are days I get hungry for good talk. I don't want to talk about my day, what I ate, what I did, where I went. I don't want to talk about the weather and public transportation and paying rent and making money and I don't want to ask or answer the question, How are you?

You know what I mean when I say good talk. The stuff that makes up living: belief, love, hope, suffering, compassion, service, purpose, death, loss, religion, government, good, evil, and on it goes.

I would be in a happy world if I could ask every stranger I met if they believed in a god and why or why not. I suppose survival dictates that we can't bare our souls to everyone we meet, and I'm certainly not the soul-baring type. But I would like to know people.

Back in October, I joined Twitter because, for years, I've been following the journal Creative Nonfiction. They have a running contest for tweets - Tiny Truths, as they're called. I would get the newsletters and see the winning tweets and think, Man, how cool. I wish that was me.

So I joined and I've been tweeting every so often and a lot of my tweets have been picked as winners in this contest. But the big prize is that a few are selected for each quarterly journal. And it is May and Creative Nonfiction: Issue #44 is out in the world now, and one of my tweets is in it.

truth and tweets.

I am easily obsessed with thoughts and topics and ideas.  I'm a thinking person, maybe to a fault.  I'm good at being alone and being quiet.

I'm currently obsessed with truth.  I've been asking people, not so subtly, what they think of truth. Good friends, casual acquaintances. How do you define truth? What do you think it is? Do you think it's important? I am reading too much philosophy, the kind that twists your brain in a knot until your left eye twitches and your stomach drops out. I am hounding truth or it is hounding me. I am beating my head against the table, against the wall, against the questions, one after another.  I am forming some thoughts.  You know what truth is?  Please tell me what you think.

Listen, it comes down to this: I made the choice to write here and write often because I wanted to write about difficult things. I want to take all of the notebooks that I have torn apart and thrown away, take those crackling words, and spill them out all over the place and let people run around in them. I want to split myself wide open and lift up my eyes and make awkward eye contact that lasts too long before I say Hi.

#cnftweet.

I signed up for Twitter awhile ago with the intention of using it for writing nuggets.  Sentences that stand alone, that I want to hold onto.

I'm finally getting around to it.

The heavyweight journal Creative Nonfiction has a running contest for tweets.  But mostly it's just another good practice.  Write one or two solid, clear sentences.  Put them out there.

Check them out on the right!  (omg).