A Filler Post

Well, if writing is the ritual draining of a wound, tonight is going to be one of those nights where a lot of the serpent’s venom comes out.

The good ideas aren’t coming to me right now, in other words. At the moment all I’m feeling is a deep exhaustion and a vague contempt/hostility toward everything. Mixed with the urge to beat myself down for not having it in me to overcome the exhaustion and hostility.

But I still have the compulsion to write, which is a good thing. Keep that alive and it will see me through to better days.

If art is an alchemical process, this is one of those nights that reminds me I’m still only in the nigredo stage.

So get ready for a fun list of halfhearted complaints I don’t fully feel justified in making — but hell, I gotta get what’s in me out of me if I’m gonna make any progress with this thing.

The thought I’ve wasted a decade of my life has been haunting me lately. I’m 28 now and I’m really no closer to being where I want to be in life than I was when I was 18.

(Not entirely true: I wasted a lot of that time, but I have put in several thousand hours of practice in writing. Maybe not the full 10,000 hours that damned idiot Malcom Gladwell goes on about, the smug bastard. But several thousand, so there’s that. I now know enough about writing to realize I don’t know jack shit about writing. Hoo-ray.)

And there’s another thing — on a related note. I feel like a lot of what I write, or a lot of what I am, is childish or juvenile, in the bad sense. Like when I was writing about how I resented the fact that I was born. It’s true, but every time I write or think it, I have that voice in my head saying, “Oh my God, Geof, grow the fuck up! You’re talking like a whiny 13-year-old.”

Which is also true enough. But I can’t let that stop me from venting these things. Because maybe if I would have gotten all these whiny 13-year-old thoughts out when I was actually 13 years old I might have gotten rid of them in a healthy way and had a normal, healthy transition into young adulthood.

But now it’s there again. The voice in the back of my head saying, “Quit your damned whining!”

Maybe that’s something I should do sometime. Just list all my complaints against existence. There would be a lot of them.

Now, listen. We all have our moods. I just happen to be in a perverse, nasty sort of mood.

I think part of it is that I’ve been trying to have a kinder, gentler attitude toward life — and to women, which (symbolically and psychologically) is the same thing. But I find when I do that I suddenly can’t come up with any ideas for fiction. What am I supposed to write about if I can’t write about horrible women and horrible men doing horrible things to each other?

I just end up writing feel-good bullshit about letting go of your resentment, trying to be a good person, and singing Kumbaya.

Maybe it’s good to think of it in alchemical terms. The end goal of the process is, indeed, to come out with a healthy and positive attitude toward life. But simply announcing “I am now completely reconciled with life” is not enough to get the job done. That just covers over the bitterness with a lot of words I don’t really mean.

What I’m saying here is that I’m thinking (hoping?) there’s a healing process at work in the writing. And it may end up looking uglier and crueler before it gets nicer. But if it’s a process the only way to get through it is to actually go through the process — not by peeking at the end to see what the end of the process looks like.

(A very Hegelian thing for me to say, come to think of it. I apologize.)

Let’s hope this is part of a healing process and not just me driving myself off a cliff. Although probably there’s potential for both, to be frank.

And if it’s a process that means there are going to be nights like this. Where all I can do is keep the words flowing and try to restrain my self-contempt as much as I can.