“Bad penmenship”. That’s the answer I give when curious people raise the question. Their inquiries fall into the same few categories.

“Shorthand?” no.

“What language is that?” It’s bad penmenship.

Here’s the official story, all true.

I was ten or so and home from school. I don’t remember if it was after class or I was home sick or what. Mom had gone through the dresser drawers and found poetry and shared it with her buddies at tea. This annoyed me immensely.

They must have found whatever I’d written to be cute. What annoyed me was they had no context. Putting words together was enjoyable and creating a structure like a poem that held together and had a rhythm was like actually making something. Like when I’d take a double A battery, a little bulb, and a wire and make a flashlight with my bare hands.

The problem is when the poem you’re building is a word play excercise but it’s taken to be a heartfelt message. How is anyone to know the difference? They don’t. Then they just run with it and assign the value that makes sense to them. Next thing you know, you’re fuming over being “not understood”.

I made the mistake years later of showing Blummy, my barber, some poetry. It wasn’t meant to convey any moody thing but was just fun to put together. My little book contained a sketch of his establishment. Next to it, I wrote the poem which was simply an attempt to construct words around a popular song they were playing on the radio, Harry Nielson “Can’t live if living is without you”.

Think of that song.

“When I’m here I’m out of touch. I wonder does it mean so much to the world as I sit contemplating doom while the night sky basks beneath the rising moon.”

Actually, I didn’t ever contemplate doom in his chair. I’ve always liked haircuts. Someone plays with your hair. That can’t be bad.

Blummy got real quiet. Then, good barbur that he was he asked lots of questions. Even I couldn’t explain back then that all I was doing was toying with words. If it had been written in some foriegn language, poor Blummy would have to rely on his wife to whom he gave Moose dropping ear rings for Christmas for pain and rejection.

Mom and I didn’t have a conversation about respecting privacy or trying to understand why I wrote the poetry. It would have been pointless to try.  Instead, I started searching for a way to still be able to write but keep my privacy and protect myself from having a fleeting thought turned into a mental mantra for life. I wanted a code!

My brothers and I shared one room, one dresser, and one closet all the way from start to finish, though I had a freezing cold bunkhouse bedroom in my senior year. No dresser, no closet, no real privacy, but it felt sort of like my own space.

I checked out cryptography books and used them for ideas on codes I could use, but a secret code was not what I needed. The functionality was all I wanted. What I needed was a writing system compatable with my thinking process and writing needs.

None of the the stuff in the books stuck with me. They were all too cludgy.

One day late in 1970 (or was it ’71?) it came to me. Popped into my head clear as could be. What I got was the structure on which to build. I went to the store and bought an empty book and started work. On scratch paper I designed the letter forms consistent with the design that came to my mind. As I worked them out, I’d write my thoughts in the empty book. There, I could test them and keep the forms that worked with my hand.

Over the next four years I hammered away at it constantly. From then till now, I have had it in continual development but at a slower rate. The value is there. It is genuine fun to write, it’s private, and it’s good for my brain.

Some of the goals I had for it were discarded when after decades of effort some important  conclusions were made. First, there is no point in trying to write an accurate enunciatory or phonetic system. Sometimes a place holder with understood application in use is the right way. Accepting that seriously emboldens the development methodologies. There are too many variations in speach and language to rely on super accurate . There is not likely to ever be a single writing system that covers all languages. What makes more sense is to apply the writing system to communication. Rather than represent only the utterances in all their glory, it makes more sense to use those as place holders on which to express thoughts. For that, each language needs it’s own variants in the writing system. It is pointless to attempt a complete phonetic representation of utterance. So I started building language like features into the writing system. I didn’t stop with phonetic development however, because I had certain objectives that I wanted to better meet. One of the best advances in recent years is redundancy. After seeing how the Russian language expresses a discrete thought concept differently depending on how it’s used in a sentence, the gender, the tense, and the relationship between conversation participants, I knew that I could certainly benefit by introducing something similar in my writing system.

Now, forty four years into it, I must applaud the security of this writing system. Even I can barely read it. But that’s fine, because the main value is two fold: it’s a way to write my fleeting thoughts and not create some permanent snippet that some future activist historian or lame dolt can portray as my true feelings on a universe in their head. Thoughts can be worked out on paper. There’s value in writing them even if they’re never read again.

I also find it useful for writing password reminders, when I can make sense of it. It’s an excellent doodle tool. Completely innocent.

Church doodle with notes about the speaker’s thoughts

No name has stuck for the writing system. My schoolmate called it “the Lingua”. Nothing I’ve ever come up with fits better, but that’s not the permanent name. I sometimes call it Saychass, which is a loose take on a Russian word for now. This, because that’s it’s best place. It is immediate.

It is fitting that for writeability I give high marks. Folks, this stuff is fun to write! It is to writing what singing is to talking. Plus, it can look pertty darned nice.

When I was in the Air Force, a friend of mine – an eccentric named Jack – chided me for working so dilligently on something I’ll never make a dime from. Well Jack, money isn’t everything. This thing has made me examine language, both written and expressed. I like the results.

For the record, no one pays me to eat either. No one pays me to learn or to consider or to champion. No one pays me to breathe.

When I started this, it was very basic. Now, it’s got real personality and genuine value. Maybe I should thank mom. But then, she wasn’t the one who gave me the build map for the letterforms. I’ve expressed my thanks to that source many times and still do.

During my legal extrication from a monsterous situation some years ago my adversary spent many thousands of dollars to decrypt a document they found posted on the wall of my art studio. It was titled in plain English, “The Master Plan”. They never asked me to tell them what it was about but decided it was some delicious dirt they could use against me. The cryptographers told them in the end that it was “A language known to no man”.

I call bull. One man did know. They didn’t bother to ask. It was a weight loss plan. So I’ll have to sell use rights at some point to recover my ten grand that they billed me for their stupidity. It was satisfying though.

Never the less, after that,  I developed exciting new features that made for a more secure, better expressed, robust writing system I could be really proud of. And I am!

Truth, if everyone learned this system then wrote it to their own personality it would be as private to almost everyone as it is to me. The letter forms have a tight range and the rules allow tight tolerances in expression but they can be adapted to your hand. I like that. It’s like having a voice, but on paper.

So after I’m dead and gone I expect you to apply these recommendations about the things I’ve written in this system:

Early stuff is kludgy and had the effect of detuning my use of language, sort of like when a person is new and has limited grasp of vocabulary.

Later stuff is whimsical, reactionary to some context that never got defined,  just brainstorming.

Don’t bother translating it. Half the time I can’t even do that.

It’s been one of life’s pleasures.

Development continues.

If you ask about it when you see me taking notes and you can’t read them I will confess, It’s bad handwriting.