9/07/09

You’ll find I’m not one for titles.  I want to preface all this by saying that I am a writer–shock– and alongside sleeping, breathing, eating, and the latter’s natural follower, writing is something that keeps me together.  Like all writers I fuck with things a little.  I smudge here, smear, stretch.  My novels are never about myself and I’d like your opinion on whether or not the characters are like me or not.  But that’s beside the point.  I don’t write about myself.  I just don’t.  The faculties I have cannot be employed in an inward manner.  Like using a microscope to see a microscope.  “A man’s at odds to know his mind because his mind is aught he has to know it with.” ~ McCarthy.

I’ve tried writing short stories from personal experience.  I haven’t been able to since I started seriously writing.  Since I graduated from Wittenberg.  My uncle died of cancer very recently and it has had a profound effect on me.  A lot has happened in the past two months and very little of it good.  But try as I might I can’t bring these hands into myself to write out my pain.  Even saying that, “my pain,” sounds silly, false.  I imagine a lot of writers would tell you that these things that have happened to me are fuel, and I should keep them close to my chest to keep them burning.  I agree.  You’ll forgive me if my mind is wandering and my point obscure.  I’ll get to why that is in a moment.  I wrote a story about Lindsay.  The beginnings of one.  If you’ve gathered from below you’ll see things didn’t work out the way we intended– not nearly.  We ran up against a lot of problems immediately and some of them are mine.  Some are hers.  Part of it was this place.  She said it was soulless and I agree with more certainty as I go along.

What I do here is not writing.  It’s pissing out my ass and it always has been and always will be.  I can’t synthesize my thoughts about myself and my experiences into a cohesive whole like I would put into my real writing, and so it goes here.  I can’t I think because, despite writing being a function of my health, it is not a power to be used on myself.  That’s selfish.  I write about people worse off than me, better than me.  Soldiers.  Fathers.  And without that cause I lose interest.  How many self-portraits are considered masterpieces?  How many autobiographies?  I use pieces of my life because my experience informs everything.  But beyond that.

There’s a line in my second book.  The main character is talking to a woman who’s about to leave him.  He says that he’d give her the world.  And she replies, “what am I supposed to do with it?”  That’s from experience.  And laying in those little pieces can be soothing.  I write all of my past into my books, really.  But if you take apart your life and change the pages around, put some in one book and some in another, it’s not the same thing.  You have somebody else’s life.  Spread it across characters, and who’s to tell?

I had these feelings, through the week.  Ones that I want to record.  There are times when I think my life is worth telling– really, you spin it right, I can sound downright fucking dramatic.  One is that brief moment when you wake from a dream, ever so brief, in which everything is fine.  I even dreamed of how awful things were, and waking from that dream it was like a second in heaven.  And then I woke up and she was beside me, back to me, and I remembered.  I’ve rarely crashed so hard to earth.  The other feeling is that no matter how many times I tell you I will never convey to you how special you are, and I fear that you won’t be told that enough in your life.  I’ve said it to you all before but it bears repeating because these are good things, and good things should always be told.  You make me want to be a better man.  A man, period.  I can’t say the same for most people.  But you do.  I fight with myself over this because even you don’t agree– that people should change like that.  I put myself on the line and I think I have stepped over boundaries that I shouldn’t have, compromised parts of myself.  And maybe I should never have done that for you.  You didn’t ask me to, but it was part of trying to make myself better.  And I’ve grown.  So I won’t call it a mistake.  Or regret it.

I’m going to take us down another tangent, quickly, before I go.  I have a tattoo on my left wrist that reminds me that I’m part of humanity, and that I should treat people accordingly.  I feel like I should get at least two more reminders: one that says to shut the hell up, and another that reminds me to keep myself right.  Confucius say: man can’t fix his family without being fixed himself.  I’ve always believed that, sarcasm aside.  After this probably I need some time to fortify myself.  I believe it’s time to walk out into that great desert for a while.