When I see them letters on the page, I just know I've done something good with my life.

I love the act of writing.

Now some of you may have misunderstood that last sentence. (It is not your fault of course; it's really due to the inherent ambiguity of language, in which words can mean more than one thing, or can have wide variations within one meaning.)

You probably thought I meant 'writing' as in the act of forming words into coherent sentences which then can be heard, read, or otherwise ingested by other persons nearby (or far away), who then decode the structure of the sentence and the definitions of the words in order to come up with some meaning (which the author may or may not have intended).

But I didn't mean that. (Thus, the decoding process failed. Silly you.) Although, I do admit that I enjoy forming sentences for decoding. It's one of my hobbies.

Nevertheless, the 'writing' to which I refer is the act of forming words on a page using a pen, pencil, stylus, paintbrush, or a particularly grubby finger. I love watching letters form in swoops and dashes as my hand moves, just touching the page there to dot the i, lifting the pen there to finish of the r, making a great loop to form the y.

There's something so satisfying about forming letters. And I'm not sure why. Although here is what I suspect:

Forming shapes is fun at any time, but forming shapes that mean something plugs, I believe, into our ancient human tradition of creating words from permanent marks made in clay or on papyrus. I think every time we cross a T or form a bold downward stroke for a D, we're reconnecting with those who first invented writing by tapping cuneiform script into clay, or with the ancient Egyptians, whose written language resembled art more than anything, or the Chinese with their countless characters, or the Greeks, or the Romans, or every other human who has held an instrument in hand and marked something so that their influence could be felt far from their immediate presence. We declare ourselves part of that tradition. Part of this ancient human family.

When I write by hand, I can also feel the passage of time more acutely. Time moves us along the atom-thin knife-edge of now, unstoppable as the future moves from far to near to now to past, all inexorably, and so so swiftly. For the most part, we ignore it, or at least, always facing forward into the immediate future as we are, we tend not to focus on the rushing-pastness of time. We're like passengers on a train (not an original image by any means, but apt) as it rushes endlessly forward. Normally, we peer forward at the track, or sometimes behind us at the things we've already seen. But the act of writing is like turning your head to look out the side window while the world whips past at an unbelievable pace. Forming letters, you see that once was blank page is now covered in marks. Marks you've made. And you're still making them, a stroke here, a dot there, a loop, all in motion, all churning the way from future to past.

Eh. Anyway. I haven't quite captured the sense of this, at least the way I feel it. But that's what writing is like. (The other kind of writing. Codification. You know.)

And why am I going on at length about something so inconsequential (sort of)? Because I have written approximately 15 mailing labels for the boxes I will ship out tomorrow. I wrote them with a sharpie. And I enjoyed it.

And that is all.