i fell asleep last night remembering these words:

'And all work is empty save when there is love;
And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God.
And what is it to work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
[...]

Work is love made visible.
And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.'

-from The Prophet by Khalil Gibran.

(i didn't remember it all word-for word. i'm not a machine, people. )

and then i remembered when it was most true. it was 2002, and i had my first, dribbling, taste of love. and i wrote a piece that still stands out as one of my best. i wrote it for him. more importantly, i wrote it like he was watching.

all my best work has been done hoping someone was watching.

vonnegut says as much in one of his autobiographical works. which one it is precisely escapes me, for which i am not embarrassed, because he repeats a lot between the various non-fictional tomes.
he emphasises the importance of having one listener. just one. one listener who you, the writer, believes is always reading, regardless of whether she/he is. for him, it was his sister. he wrote every joke knowing she would laugh at it.

the greeks, in a roundabout and somewhat more pantheological way, called them muses, and assigned them to various artforms.

my writing lacks grit, lacks some raw breed of beauty when i don't have a muse in mind. when who is watching is less important than writing something, anything down.

these days, i care who is reading. but the muscle is not conditioned.

(i am also much a dunce with computers. how to rid the first line of crappy font? maybe not copy and paste in future...)