Sometimes I wonder if there's any honesty in my writing. It's a performance for me. I'm throwing together the nouns, the adjectives, and the odd adverb, hoping that the spectacle will entertain. It usually entertains at least a few people, so I'm told I have talent. But honesty? No, none.

Truth is stranger than fiction only because there's no real truth in fiction. I challenge someone to write out their exact thoughts without embellishment or clarification. It'd be an awful jumbled mess. I'm going to try now...

Every day is exactly the same. Every day is exactly the same. It sucks when dirt sticks to my sweaty feet when I'm wearing flip-flops, but wearing real shoes in the heat is worse. I can't believe Closer was actually released – it's a ridiculously filthy song. It puts anything that people complain about nowadays to shame. Go Trent Reznor. I can't believe he's forty.

I wonder if anyone can actually work while listening to music – well, lyrical music, at least. The words just interfere with the words in your own thoughts and make a mess. You get me closer to God. I'm nauseous. How can I be nauseous when there's nothing in my stomach? I haven't eaten since last night.

Crap. Even my previous paragraphs were edited, paragraphed, and clarified somewhat. Capitalization and italicization exist to clarify things for the reader, not the writer, so they're just a part of the showmanship of writing. There is no such thing as writing directly from one's experience. I've never read Ulysses, but I wonder if it manages to do that – get thoughts onto paper exactly as they occur.

I think this is a radical realization, but I'm probably just restating someone else's explanation of the limitations of language. Language is the tool with which we shape reality. Words have a common agreed-upon definition so that the sound “flower” corresponds to more or less the same image for different people.