I Write

I write. I write and write and write, and for what? What do I have to prove to anybody? That I write? Yes, I write. Do I even enjoy it? I think so. I think I love it. But maybe not. I always feel so oppressed by the prospect of how long it’s going to take me to write what I have in mind, whatever it is that I have in mind before I finally sit down to write. I come up with some form of ingenuity, some new-fangled plot or character or storyline or whatever, and I think about it and mull over it until it swells so enormously inside of me that it fills me to my edges and it’s like overeating or being emotionally overwhelmed. I need a catharsis, a purge, and so I sit down to write. But as soon as I do, I stare at the oppressively blank page, a new Word document pretty and untarnished and virginal, and I feel even more overwhelmed, like I could never meet the demands of the blank page challenging me back, staring me in the eyes, the flawless bright white beginning to sting. And I just can’t do it. Sometimes I write a few sentences. A paragraph or two. I reread what I wrote, and my head begins to hurt. I get so frustrated, that I’m short of breath and I need to get up and ironically smoke a cigarette, typically destroy myself because I can’t meet the idyllic demands of my young, pathological mind.
Somehow, writing has helped me further lose myself. Believe it or not, the more I delve into anything, the more I excel and perfect whatever craft I dedicate myself to, the more I begin to lose myself. I begin to question every nuance until I no longer recognize the piece as a cohesive essay or narrative or monologue or whatever, but instead as a bunch of thoughts thrown together that only marginally have anything to do with one another. Each thought with its own separate histories, meanings, cadences, and tones. They don’t reflect anyone or anything in particular, in other words. You know, like a voice. Every writer has a voice. But my voice, it’s more like a cut-and-paste ransom note fashioned particularly for anonymity.
For example, is it really me-esque to say “new-fangled”? How does that read to other people? If someone were to read this right now, what sort of person would they think I am? “Oh, he’s just another nerd,” or “Hm, interesting, he seems to be culturally confused,” or “What the hell kind of word is that?” Surely, I won’t draw the derisive smile, the cynical chuckle I must have been attempting to draw out. In fact, most of the time when I look back at my work, the last thing I consider it being is interesting. I have what, three, four blogs? In fact, I even have this old one, ancient, lost sea-scrolls of my life, cataloguing an entire year of my experiences. Retrospectively, I think that the writing was alright, but the narrative was amazing. I figure that my life was at least halfway interesting. You know, the sex, the drugs, the drama, the tragedy. Isn’t that what people lust for? Isn’t that what they desire most, what entertains them most effectively?
Anyway, my point is that over the years that this latter afore-described blog has existed, people have navigated to it just a little under two hundred times. Ever. You can be sure that most of those times were me. The prior three blogs, there’s no telling. I enrolled in a class in which the class had to sustain a blog together on the same website, and the teacher still didn’t take the time out to read one piece. To make matters even better, by the time someone with an opinion who mattered, the independent studies professor I had following the death of the prior class, actually took the time to read anything I wrote in any of my blogs, he said that they were trite, stilted, uninteresting, raw, green, and novice. In essence, he said that they were shit.
Alright, so forget the fact that I spent hours upon hours – fifteen, twenty, thirty maybe –rewriting and editing and re-editing those blogs over this last summer. I mean, I had already written them, over time, over the last couple of years, but I wrote them over again, and again, and rewrote them some more until they seemed streamlined and perfect and seamless. Then I edited them and edited them some more until I was almost certain that they were Pulitzer Prize material. These blogs, I poured my mother fucking heart into them.
He said that they’re bullshit. They suck; pieces that serve only to exemplify just how much work I need to put into improving my trade, my hobby, my passion. Fuck. I thought I was maybe a little bit of something, even half of something on my brighter days, and I ended up not being anything at all. Except maybe bullshit. Yeah, the world could easily agree on that. But definitely not anything distinct, pure, amazing, or inspirational. Just tragic.
I mean, let’s go back to that blog that detailed a year in my life. That has so much of me in it. So much of the raw, unhinged, unbiased, unabashed me. It’s so passionately me that even I interest in reading it from time to time. I was living with my mother. I was severely depressed. Terribly angry with the world. I had lost hope in any real happiness and lost faith in personal development. I was just existing in a chasm of loss and regret.
But I was so optimistic. You would think that everything was just fucking fine. I would elucidate days that would serve as catalysts to extremes for anyone else, such as irrationalities like suicide or homicide with the sort of cold, disconnected cynicism that would suggest that I was making it up. I mean, that was some of the time. Other times I was so maudlin about such trivial matters that it both confused and nauseated me. And I really wanted it to be someone else. It reflected someone who was definitely interesting, but someone I definitely did not want to be. But guess what: yes indeed, that was I. And this is me. And this is my life. And I can’t do shit about it. That is one of the hardest things for me to swallow when I wake up in the morning and sometimes before I go to sleep, knowing that, more than likely, I’m going to have to wake up in the morning.
There are a few key people in my life. These few people are the opinions that mean the most to me and who I turn to when I need validation. When I need to know that perhaps I’m wrong and I actually am worth a damn, that my work means anything at all, these are the people I turn to. Of these people, I think maybe one of them has ever read that blog. I’m pretty sure I invited all of them to at one time or another. A sort of… I don’t know, maybe I thought it was the sincerest of gifts. In my feeble little naïve mind, I thought I was giving them something that no one else had and hardly anyone else was willing to give: an extremely intimate view into my mind. You want to get to know me? Here: take a piece of my life.
Yeah, almost none of them were interested enough. They just didn’t care to know. They didn’t think that it was something they really wanted to get their fingers dirty with. Or maybe my writing is just so fucking boring that they couldn’t possibly labor through each drudging sentence. So this gift of my intimate mind, something most people never, ever give to anyone, no one was even interested in having it. That’s how pathetically insignificant I am. Or how pathetically bad at writing I am.
But I’m a writer. It’s what I do.
So. Why am I writing this time? It’s two minutes from two thirty in the morning. HBO rewound and is replaying Little Shop of Horrors, Little Richard screeching and moaning from the gaping mouth of a blood-lusting plant—something that looks somewhat like an enormous Venus Flytrap—as that other actor, the main character, whatever his name is, he was in a few key eighties movies I think, not a bad guy at all, as he sings back to the plant in the way that suggests that he doesn’t belong on Broadway, but is still pleasant enough for me to allow this movie to play as the backdrop to this literary vomit without me jabbing the power button on the television in a frustrated fit. I do have those fits from time to time. It just gets to the point that all of these nonsensical voices in the background begin to drive me fucking crazy. It’s like having voices in your head, I can’t imagine how someone can just let a TV play in the background while they try to do anything. Like those people who study while watching TV. How the fuck to do they do that?! They must be full of shit. There’s no way you can deal with something talking at you for fucking ever while you try to concentrate on understanding or memorizing something. Doesn’t all that yapping get in the way? It would be that same person, that same individual who would sit in front of the television all day long, all night, eating, sleeping, picking their noses, masturbating, picking their teeth, cleaning the house, clipping their toenails, all while watching TV, it would be those same motherfuckers who want to call you long-winded or ask you to please shut up, they’re trying to watch something. What. The. Fuck.

- P.