Sketchiness in Action

Sketchiness is many things.   

You can feel sketchy walking down a dark alley at night.  You might act all sketchy and slink away to a corner when, at a party, you see your ex-wife walk in with her new husband.  You might wonder if the the Rolex watch your father bought you from a street vendor in Hong Kong is for real or sort of, you know, sketchy.   

Sketchy is a way of viewing the world.  It’s slightly skewed and skewering.  Of course, sketchiness is also a way of quickly drawing a picture, i.e. a sketch.  I like to do that with words.  Just something quick and not fully rendered.  My friend, the poet David Biespiel, calls it “side work” and he believes that writers don’t do nearly enough of this.    

David says –and I agree – that we’re too concerned with the “perfect” essay, the “lyric” paragraph, the “beautiful” stanza.  We should, instead, be trying to capture the ieffable quality of the little black kid pedaling his BMX bike twice as fast as the older neighborhood boys, determined to keep up.  We should be quickly sketching out the moment of cognitive dissonance we feel upon realizing that our parent has died and everything in our world has shifted and yet, to the outside, we look exactly the same.   We should be worried about getting it right, but not perfect. 

That’s real sketchiness.  You can be sketchy, too. 

Read about my adventures in sketchiness.