It’s two weeks until Christmas and my blog is snowing. No, seriously, there is a snow GIF on my blog. I’m not sure how I feel about this. It’ll all melt off by January 4th–about the time that, I am told, snow will fall for real in my neck of the woods. Maybe by then I’ll have a job, so I can buy snow boots. Otherwise I’ll have to trust to thick socks and flimsy cloth sneakers.
I am looking once again down the barrel of my writing. The strange creatures that haunted the pages of my comics are calling to me again, wanting to give birth to themselves from the corners of my mind.
I’m not sure how I feel about that, either.
In the midst of a crisis of confidence--or perhaps a four-on-the-floor depression, who the hell knows?–I decided my writing was…well…bupkus. Utter, total, and complete
bupkus. I was a hack, a wannabe, with all the writing talent of a squid, and I’d be better off investigating a
real line of work, like, say, my local 7-11.
So I stopped. Completely.
But the ideas won’t go away. They flirt on the outskirts of my mind; tiny black-winged figures in the distance, soaring over the trees, somewhere between threatening and begging, waiting to be brought screaming to life beneath my typing fingertips. I find no joy in creating them, no joy in the process of making them coherent in the plot-line, and some pain in that they
won’t tell me what they’re up to! I only have the vaguest, most frustrating idea.
But there is a perfect beauty to their flight, their menace, the way they can destroy and mutilate lives, then disappear without a trace. There is a terrible wonder in the way they devour others, and something inspirational in the heroes that oppose them, though they barely know what it is they’re up against. There are so many story threads here that I need a chart to map them–brother to sister, brother to friend, sister to friend, friend to friend, friend to lover, lover to lover, lives blown apart by the deepest connections, ties severed and wounds flayed as only the closest of friends can do, now in desperate need of mending before the darkness comes for them all.
And still, I’m writing a blog post instead, putting off the damned struggle of herding and wrestling all these ephemeral cats down onto the paper and pinning them in place, my collection of feral, furry little butterflies. I’m dodging the scratches to my psyche, the claw marks in my hopes and dreams, the little teeth biting viciously through my self confidence and tearing it away in chunks. I avoid the specter of my own failure by failing to try, and while that accomplishes nothing, at least I still hold the dream that I could have succeeded. You know, if I
really wanted to.
You ever wonder how it is we can so easily lie to ourselves, even when we know what we’re doing is a lie?
These days I sometimes wonder if that’s all any of it is, a lie. I will never get a job or unemployment, but run out of money and be kicked out of my home. I will lose everything I own and roam the streets begging for a little compassion from a cash-strapped and increasingly hostile country, hoping not to be raped or murdered by people who see how vulnerable I am. I will never go overseas to meet my one true love, but break his heart and my own with false promises I can never keep. I will never see my son again. I’ll be seen as a shameful influence and a fuck-up by his parents. And I will never, ever, not in a million years, write my bestselling novel.
So why even try?
Sometimes the answer “because I need to eat and maybe keep warm” is the only one that keeps any of us going. It’s certainly a good enough one for me. So I will try again, for god and country and a desperate need to eat.
And who knows, maybe I’ll get lucky.
