I read ““Writing Without Teachers,” by Peter Elbow in college. One of the things he talks about is how a daily freewriting exercise can free the writer’s mind to write better. It involved writing for at least ten minutes and not stopping even to think of the next word you’re going to write. Not thinking of ideas. Not starting in one place and not going to another. So, I tried to get back into the practice, which I used to do regularly, today. Here is the result. Hope you enjoy.
Freewriting. Writing freely. Writing about freedom. Writing to free the thoughts and ideas that sit untapped, stored in a can of sardines on a pallet on a ship in the harbor, a ship with a name of mostly consonants, painted thickly with a reddish pink or pinkish red sea faring paint and stacked with a seemingly infinite variety of colored shipping containers that, once removed, once unpacked, are placed neatly on trucks and indeed become the containers on the trucks – MAERSK and other names that make me, even an adult, curious as to what they contain, where they come from, China probably, where they’re going, various Walmarts or Michael’s probably, how much they’re worth and if we really need them as if they are but another example of the freedom we hold so dear, the same freedom that holds so many others captive and economically enslaved so that we can enjoy our toilet bowl scrubbers, our Christmas ornaments, our multi-colored ink pens and infinite notepad designs like this one made “sustainably” from the waste of the sugar cane manufacturing process, made for and by Staples stores, but still, behind the sugar industry in Florida where maybe some of that material originates, is a political corruption that spoils millions of acres in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars that’s reported on in the Miami Herald but continues despite the corruption that holds migrant families hostage in the Land of the Free.
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