Duprass and the Most Dangerous App

Between a steroid shot, decongestants, cough suppressants, and expectorants--all on top of a week of heavy theatrical lifting--my brain is a sludgy vat of inertia right now.

The trick to freewriting, I tell my students, is that there's no way to get it wrong except by stopping. You stop writing, you stop doing the thing. Even if you write, "I can't think of anything to write. I can't think of anything to write. I can't think of anything to write," for a page, you simply have to believe in the trick of writing for its own sake. Something good will come from it.

A similar idea fuels The Most Dangerous Writing App, which I read about on BoingBoing. You start writing (well, typing) with a time limit, say 5 minutes. Stop writing for too long before that timer is up and all of your writing starts to fade. That's impressive as a way of getting students to write constantly. I'm not sure I need that now...

...I type, as I stall and stare out the window. Two smart-looking motorcycles of different styles just pulled up and parked outside the coffee shop I'm typing in. An older couple--thin, grey-haired, both with beautifully long braids--dismount and stroll into the store, hand in hand. She wears faded denim jacket and jeans, he a leather jacket.

They're a duprass, I think. In Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Cat's Cradle, he structures the narration around a catechism in the made-up religion of Bokononism. It's made-up both in the literal sense and in the diegetic sense, as in it's a fabrication of one of the characters that nevertheless gets taught and practiced as a real faith.

A karass, in Bokonon's religion, is a group of people who are cosmically linked in some way, even though it may seem that they are unrelated. Karasses contrast with granfalloons, false groupings that pretend to great significance.

A duprass is a karass of two: two people linked by fate to mutual existence. They are soul-mates.

I'm romanticizing. I know nothing about this elderhippie couple save that they perform linkedness.

I like seeing that. There are several married couples in the show I'm in. I watch the couples come close together, look into each other's eyes, smile, and kiss or embrace. Most of them, I know, have been together many yearss.

The script of love in the USA leads us to yearn for duprass pairings, the soul mates that hold hands after motorcycling to a coffee shop on a Saturday night.

The scripts rarely live up to their promises in life. Or maybe we fail to live out the scripts.

Most pairings in my experience are work. They feel fragile, ephemeral, not cosmically fated. They fade if you stop moving, stop developing.

Maybe that's why they ride motorcycles, to keep from fading out, to keep living the most dangerous app of all.

More tomorrow,

JF