Sometimes I wonder if I’m trying to be creative or if I just let things fall into place. It’s a bit of both, I’m sure. Either way I wind up frustrated, wanting to chug my body weight in whiskey intent on snorting, smoking, and sticking every drug within phone’s reach into my body because part of being creative is weeding out all the crap – and there is tons of it - and this newfound sobriety kick isn't very difficult, but bottom line - sobriety blows - but I'm stuck with it, like it or not.
People look to the news for ideas – I’ve never been partial to the news. No one ever tells the whole truth, but that’s good because it leaves perceptions open to all types of interpretation, which in turn I hope would lead to interesting writing, but more often than not it leads to more frustration. Even now I’m working on a story that has no ending. I’m breaking one of my core stipulations – never begin a story until you have an ending. It doesn’t mean that’s the ending you’ll write too, it just means that there is some kind of destination to be reached. The most thrilling part about writing is the journey – the characters – the language – it all consumes the writer; the story tells the writer where to go.
I try not to follow politics because it pains me to believe that anyone with a slim chance of making the United States a better country will ever get elected and do just that – make the United States a better country, not just for their rich, tycoon, scrotum-licking business associates, but for most people in general. And if they do try make the U.S. a better place they'll only be mysteriously killed for their troubles, but to make it a better place, everyone has to take a hit as well as a receive an upgrade. Someone always has to take the shitty hand, but instead of dumping it on the middle and lower classes, of which there are none – you’re either top class or bottom class, there is no middle – much like spreading the wealth around, you have to spread the shit around. Everyone is going to have to eat a slice. They don’t have to like it, just accept it and be thankful for the more fortunate parts of the deal.
But that’s not America anymore. People used to believe that the American Dream was being successful by making a living out of good ideas and hard work; now, it’s all about good ideas and how to make millions of dollars by pissing gasoline on the workers that earned the entrepreneur a chance in hell and thanking them by puking fire all over their hours of pressured perseverance.
I’m not telling you anything any other established writer hasn’t said in the last three centuries. The only difference is I’m not established, but unlike established writers I have my mechanics down. My grammar and common knowledge of basic spelling and research saves me from an editor’s grace because, quite frankly, the American lawyers hired today by major law firms wouldn’t know how to use a semi-colon if a Singapore-born disease eroded half of their own ass. I listened to a federal judge call in to a highly regarded law firm on speaker phone to a room full of top dollar earning lawyers and verbally trounce all of their written statements over the lack of knowledge over the basics of grammar and wordsmith. It was hilarious and sad – bittersweet – I’m twice the writer any of them are, but I struggle to crack the fiber glass ceiling of acknowledgement, which I can say is fine by me. I don’t have to play by anyone’s rules. I am literary chaos, I am brutal honesty. I am the person you won’t read or listen to because I speak the truth, and because it’s not on Twitter or Facebook, you’re de-evolving brain and its diluting capacity for informatory intake can’t handle what I’m saying, and no internet petition or blog will change the world. It could light the spark for change, but a spark is all it will be.
Eventually, force will be necessary, cell phones will have to be used for more than slingshotting disgruntled birds across a screen, or taking pictures with the same friends you've known for ten years at the same damn bar you've been frequenting for the exact same amount of time, but when that time comes, most of us are already doomed because the majority of us do not think for ourselves anymore. We always believe what the loudest person in the room is saying even though the context is sparkle covered gibberish, but since they’re loud and have a YouTube account with over three-thousand hits they must be right, right?
I know I still have to spell it out for most of you, but at this point I’m better off putting a bullet through my head, or six through yours – unlike literature, math has never been my strongest subject.
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