I Suspect That I’m Getting Better At This. What Is This? That Would Be Writing. Pause. Scratch Chin.
I suspect that I’m getting better at this. What is this? That would be writing. Pause. Scratch chin. Take sip of water. Get up and close the door. I sit with my feet up on the desk. My keyboard sits in my lap and I type away.
It was one of those angry drives home. It was one of those drives home where I just got murder in my heart. I just got weaponized hate up in me. Anything I might possibly say is gonna be barely coherent. I’m gonna shout. I’m gonna keep shouting til I can’t anymore. I’ll be out of breath and none of it will be cathartic. I won’t feel better. I hate that kinda anger. I’m glad I didn’t do that today. It’s anger at the world and the people who run it. People talk about evil. They talk about people who do monstrous things. They talk about ‘em like they got glowing red eyes and how you can smell sulfur when they walk by. I believe it was Hannah Arendt who talked about the banality of evil. It’s these utterly unremarkable dudes like Scott Pruitt and Jeff Sessions who fuck up the world. They don’t look like monsters but what they do is monstrous. They get to manufacture a hellish reality for millions of people and then they probably go home and watch Blue Bloods or Chicago PD or something and then maybe their wife gives them a half-hearted hand job and then they are back at it the next day. That’s how they do.
It’s good that I’m diligent at putting words to the page almost every single day but maybe I need to strive for more than that. I don’t know what exactly. I think the paragraph above had its moments. I fantasize about poetry and literary journalism.
Making a living distracts me. Takes too much time, ya dig? Shit. That fucking game has us all by the nuts.
I think to myself, “Where the fuck you going with this? Do you just want to stop? Chill the rest of the night?”
I really do.
I will actually.
More Posts from Mistahsojourner and Others
The inner-city crack epidemic is now giving birth to the newest horror: a bio-underclass, a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth...[This is] a race of (sub)human drones ... [whose] future is closed to them from day one. Theirs will be a life of certain suffering, of probable deviance, of permanent inferiority. At best, a menial life of severe deprivation ... [T]he dead babies may be the lucky ones.
-Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer in 1989.
People like to pretend there was a time when the American conservative was sane and not possessed by cruelty and a special kinda crazy.
It’s not a myth. It’s a lie. It’s total bullshit.
That’s so called respectable (and soon to be deceased) conservative writer/thinker/fantasist/whatever the fuck Charles Krauthammer condemning an entire class of people when they were fetuses back in the much simpler and much more innocent year of 1989.
Only difference now is there is less sophistication. Less subtlety.
There were dog whistles before but now the dog whistles are replaced by screams and shrieks.
You could say something wicked this way comes but you’d be wrong.
Something wicked was always here and just leveled up the wickedness. Just made it nastier. Just made it harder to look at. Just made it make your ears bleed faster so you plug them and tell yourself it’s all gonna be okay.
See, we all gotta confront the possibility that it might not be okay.
Note to self
Need to reflect on the features in society that exacerbate or animate depression or other mental illnesses. The way out of the darkness clearly isn’t self-help or drugs.
A Moment on a Tough Day
You join hands with your sister.
You pray over a sick dog.
Was a good day. It was a day I could half-way breathe. I handled what needed to be handled and then I went home.
The air is hot. I’m just in here with me.
For some reason, I talk a lot at work today. I talk way more than usual. I make people laugh. I get told I’m funny. I get told that I should do stand-up. I confess that in my 20s, I sorta tried that. I told him it didn’t go so well because I half-assed it and I didn’t have a god damn thing to say. He asked me if I think I do now. I said, yeah but I didn’t have anything unique to say.
I didn’t try so hard at stand-up. Maybe it wasn’t for me. I don’t know.
Thing is though, I took some risks in the way that I perform me and someone liked it.
I like that.
That was cool.
I think I’m slowly getting over myself. The operative word is slowly.
My desire is to become better at writing. Why? My sense is that it could lead me to a more fulfilling life. My standard answer to the question, “Why write?” has been that I find it satisfying but it’s more than that. As a human being, my desire is to lead a fulfilling life. In fact, that might be the thing that I want more than anything you care to name. I don’t think it will lead me to anything like financial security though. Financial security is elusive. There is tension there. This world is a bitch to live in like that. Everything is so god damn expensive. This shimmering dream of a world that might really be a nightmare has us all running ragged for a collection of dead Presidents that is just big enough to make it through another day.
This is gonna sound like bullshit but I also connect my writing to the struggle for justice. Writing is a vehicle for conveying truth. Words can bridge the gap between human beings who are profoundly alienated by the endless chasing of nickels and dimes. People who work jobs that leave them bleary-eyed and bored and angry need to know they aren’t alone. Maybe I can reach out and touch a few who are on the same frequency. Maybe I’m not even qualified to do that but I figure that I’ve got to try. Why the fuck not?
I get the sense that I’ve got to challenge myself. I gotta try and write something that takes some effort. I was thinking an essay of some kind. I’ve got to give it some thought. I don’t know that I can pull it off and maybe I can’t. I might learn something from trying.
If this reads like inspiration porn, I apologize. I hate that shit.
