When You Can’t Look Away

I’ve been posting daily on Medium for close to two and a half months.

I love writing. Apart from sex and death, it may be the only thing in this life I really love. I know that sounds incredibly morbid, but I don’t really care. And anyway, I love the writing enough to keep me going through the rest of it.

A week or two ago I saw a post about Balzac on LinkedIn. I haven’t read much Balzac — in fact I think the only work of his I’ve ever read was the first couple hundred pages of Lost Illusions, which I’m sure I’ll read in full at some point.

But something struck me about Balzac. The post said he spent an average of 17 hours per day writing. Dedicating the rest of his waking life to beautiful women and good food.

And honestly… that sounds exactly like the kind of life I want to live.

At this point, I can’t spend 17 hours a day writing. For one thing I’m not making any money from it, so I have to do other things to earn my daily bread — but that’s a temporary problem. There are ways, or there will be ways. Just a matter of sheer cussedness and unmitigated hatred for this accursed material world.

For another thing, at this point I don’t have the structure, support system, and discipline in place to be able to fully dedicate myself to writing that much. But I have an inkling of how the thing’s done. I’ll let you know part of the secret — not that I know the whole thing, mind you.

Part of it is that “discipline” is entirely the wrong category to use when talking about a writing habit. Discipline has so many connotations of moralizing, finger-wagging, do-goodery, citizenship, responsibility, care for your fellow-man, lameness, and general squareness that (at least for someone of my generally perverse psychological type) anything that gets framed as “discipline” becomes unbearable.

Tell me I should eat apples for my health and I’ll never touch the motherfuckers.

Tell me Almighty God has forbidden me to eat an apple and I will move Heaven and Earth to get a single bite.

So how does this apply to a writing habit? Simple.

It’s not a discipline. It’s an addiction, an obsession, and it’s the perfect crime. As long as I see what I’m doing as the purest, most unredeemable evil imaginable, I will pour my full self and my whole existence into the writing process — because otherwise I’d have to do something actually evil and destructive, like strangling whores or drinking myself to sleep every night.

It’s a matter of applying the same underlying destructive principles that lead to something like an alcohol addiction and turning them to constructive ends.

Just don’t call my attention to the fact that they are constructive. Like I said, I can only keep my motivation as long as I can tell myself what I’m doing is a Promethean rebellion against the gods. The moment anybody tells me what I’m doing is good or admirable, in that moment it becomes disgusting to me.

(Good or admirable in the moral sense, that is, not the aesthetic.)

Which brings me to another point that keeps cropping up every now and then. People ask me what I think about this-or-that political issue, or what kind of political program I embrace, or things like that.

Here is my complete political vision in three words: I don’t care.

Now, I get it. I know you’re “supposed to care,” and I know political apathy “opens the door to obscene horrors the likes of which have not been seen on earth for decades.”

But.

I just don’t care.

Seriously. I’m way too wrapped up in getting to the point where I’m making up stories for 17 hours a day and spending the rest of my time with beautiful and sexually available women. And you expect me to care about which party has their idiot in the White House or whether the globe is getting warmer or some nonsense like that?

Yikes. Big oof.

The way I see it, I’m already doing everybody a favor by finding an alternate outlet for my urges to cold bloody murder. I mean… can’t people who are well-adjusted, okay with existence in general, and don’t daily curse the fact that they were born worry about that kind of thing?

I am not the kind of person anyone should come to for political opinions.

Okay. Okay. You know what. Let me have another go at stating my political ideology.

Here’s my political manifesto: Geofrey Crow should have enough money to be able to write for 17 hours a day and be surrounded by a harem of gorgeous women between the ages of 18 and 22 for the rest of the day.

And that’s what I think, as far as politics goes.

Maybe this will change with time. Once I’m actually writing for 17 hours a day I’m sure I’ll have plenty of time to work through my political thinking — when you’re spending that much time writing, eventually you have to touch on every subject. As is, anything I could say about politics right now is at best second- or thirdhand and not really mine. They’re just things I’ve heard people around me think that have happened to appeal to me.

Beyond that. What can I say? I’m an absolute narcissist. While I am sort of vaguely aware there’s a world outside of my experiences and everything is all interdependent, and yadda yadda yadda… politics is so boring.

And I get it. It’s a good thing when politics is boring. When politics gets interesting is when you have things like millions of peasants starving in the Ukraine.

But it’s no good. I can’t get into politics.

Politics can’t suck my cock and it’s not a story I’m working on about a powerful dictator who causes the deaths of millions through sheer hatred of existence.

Seriously. Asking me to involve myself in politics is like asking a cyanide pill to involve itself in your glass of wine.

I corrupt everything I touch and I relish the thought of evil.

For fuck’s sake, just let me stick to fiction. My involvement in politics would lead nowhere good.

Anyway. I need to write more and I need to figure out how to make my living through the writing. Working on it.

Toodles!