You know when your coughs taste like the monkey bars you “accidentally” tasted in grade school because you were a filthy child? You know… like blood? I remember years later in health class when I found out that blood actually has a significant number of metal ions in it and finally making the connection. It was a moment of clarity I’ll never forget due to my mild embarrassment over sucking on a monkey bar.
Anyway, I just coughed and it tasted like that. Not like blood, but like metal. I think I’m getting sick. Or maybe I’m becoming a Terminator, which would be even more upsetting. It could be some computer virus. Let's review the symptoms: every time I blink my eyes, one pixel is removed from the clothing of a thickly muscled lumberjack until he is fully naked before me and pouring out two sloppy shots of bourbon. He tells me that the woods are unkind and then we knock those suckers back and kiss each other like our lives depended on it. Happens every time. The only bug I cannot catch is love. Our relations must remain purely erotic and devoid of emotional fire. A Terminator, unfortunately, can’t have it all.
Where was I? Oh yeah, I think I’m getting sick.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Pooptown - Poopulation: 1
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything. I’d like to blame it on an excess of good times, but the fact is I could have been writing for months and I haven’t been. It would be like saying I’ve been "practicing" abstinence. Somewhere I crossed a line where the strength it took to climb back on the horse was more than the horse could travel, but if I’d stayed on, I could snap the reins and write anything whenever I wanted. Now I’m stuck in the mud. Nobody hasn’t been there, I think.
But I have always been more comfortable with my drawings than with my writing. And having read over everything related to my current project over the last few days, I’ve come to several crushing realizations about it:
1) it sucks
2) it’s hacky
3) it’s unoriginal
4) it’s pointless
5) it’s timid
6) it doesn’t resonate
7) it all reflects me
No matter how good I felt about my progress, something about it always felt wrong. I didn't say anything because I didn’t know what I was doing. I don't think I've been writing.
Yes, I have been arranging words into sentences and paragraphs on the page. But I’m still in barren country because I haven’t started walking yet. I’m still too afraid and too self-absorbed to write something that could connect with anybody else. Like my writing, I feel like a sideshow. It makes me scared to see myself differently.
I’ve been afraid to travel where other people have gone because I might do it the same as them. Instead I try to sell my little spot to you because I need to believe it’s better than yours. The alternative terrifies me because it suggests that I’ve been doing things wrong for my entire life.
There’s still a part of me believes I am special because I’m David and I’m a writer. There are worlds in my head that I can’t stop from being there, even while the rest of me worries that I'll never be able to tell you about them. Maybe they’re just too personal to be shared as they are. The truer I stayed to them and to myself, the more sickeningly arbitrary it all felt. I guess if you try to bring a really deep well to the surface, it turns into a really big puddle.
For better or for worse, anybody who takes their work seriously measures their own worth against the strength of their art, because they see themselves in it. It’s pretty easy to feel worthless if you think your work sucks. How not to? But the part of me that still feels special wants to believe that the things in my head are worth sharing. Maybe not as they are, because to see these things naked diminishes them. But I’m just fine to see that world peek its little limbs out of the shadows. It doesn’t need me shrink-wrapping the woods before I realize what I’ve done. I’d rather believe this world can grow forever, maybe in the dust and corners of whole other stories, than prove that it can’t. That mystery is too precious. I would be wrong to trap it in amber.
But I have always been more comfortable with my drawings than with my writing. And having read over everything related to my current project over the last few days, I’ve come to several crushing realizations about it:
1) it sucks
2) it’s hacky
3) it’s unoriginal
4) it’s pointless
5) it’s timid
6) it doesn’t resonate
7) it all reflects me
No matter how good I felt about my progress, something about it always felt wrong. I didn't say anything because I didn’t know what I was doing. I don't think I've been writing.
Yes, I have been arranging words into sentences and paragraphs on the page. But I’m still in barren country because I haven’t started walking yet. I’m still too afraid and too self-absorbed to write something that could connect with anybody else. Like my writing, I feel like a sideshow. It makes me scared to see myself differently.
I’ve been afraid to travel where other people have gone because I might do it the same as them. Instead I try to sell my little spot to you because I need to believe it’s better than yours. The alternative terrifies me because it suggests that I’ve been doing things wrong for my entire life.
There’s still a part of me believes I am special because I’m David and I’m a writer. There are worlds in my head that I can’t stop from being there, even while the rest of me worries that I'll never be able to tell you about them. Maybe they’re just too personal to be shared as they are. The truer I stayed to them and to myself, the more sickeningly arbitrary it all felt. I guess if you try to bring a really deep well to the surface, it turns into a really big puddle.
For better or for worse, anybody who takes their work seriously measures their own worth against the strength of their art, because they see themselves in it. It’s pretty easy to feel worthless if you think your work sucks. How not to? But the part of me that still feels special wants to believe that the things in my head are worth sharing. Maybe not as they are, because to see these things naked diminishes them. But I’m just fine to see that world peek its little limbs out of the shadows. It doesn’t need me shrink-wrapping the woods before I realize what I’ve done. I’d rather believe this world can grow forever, maybe in the dust and corners of whole other stories, than prove that it can’t. That mystery is too precious. I would be wrong to trap it in amber.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Blogsnot
I've been terrible about keeping up my blog. I promise to update constantly and be terrible at it.
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