I don’t feel very good right now.

I feel slightly dizzy, a touch nauseous,, my lower intestines are feeling testy, my head aches despite th Alleve I took, and my back hurts in the very specific way it does when there’s a bit of a backup on the Hershey Highway and I should expect delays.

And cramps. Definitely cramps.

So far, none of these symptoms rise to the level of being severe or even moderate. The worst one’s headache and that’s probably from my sinuses getting clogged and I know how to deal with that.

There are multiple ways to relieve the pressure and get things flowing again. On multiple levels, come to think of it. It’s like I have body wide constipation and everything is clogged up and backed up.

Anyhow, all the little pains add up to me feeling cranky and irritable. If I had serious obligations, ones where I had to deal with people, I might come across as a wee bit testy and there would be a real chance that I would lash out at someone with my sarcastic wit and hurt them badly.

In fact, I am pretty sure that in a workplace environment, I would have to make a point at seeing how other people deal with anger and frustration and try to learn to do it the same way. I certainly couldn’t “speak my mind” every time I felt like it.

When I speak my mind, my voice is very loud.

It comes from spending so much time alone, I suppose. Amongst the whole host of social skills I never learned is how to modulate one’s expression of one’s opinions in order to not come across as a volatile lunatic.

Most of my views were developed in a social vacuum and hence they do not take other people’s feelings into account at all. Why would they? Feelings are not facts, and I cared only about the truth.

In other words, I really was a volatile lunatic on a social level. When people are sharing their opinions on something, it’s a social ritual, not a bloody symposium.

And so when I express my detailed, thorough, precise,. and passionate opinions, it leaves people feeling like they have just been attacked by someone who wanted to make them feel stupid.

The fact that this was not my intention means very little. It is a predictable and avoidable consequence oh my behaviour and it is therefore my ethical duty to change it.

Ironically, I think the very passion and vehemence of my articulated opinions would make me a very good public speaker, especially of the rabble rousing kind. When addressing the public, the concern for how “loud” you are being is diminished and if the object of the speech is to call people to action, passion and projection is exactly what is needed to reach down into people’s souls and find that spark of anger at all the things that have gone wrong in their lives and, through articulation of that for which they do not yet have words, fire them up.

Restraint on my part in these matters is never fun, of course. The id rarely appreciates restraint and a big part of me wants to write words of blood and fire across the sky and to hell with anyone who can’t take it. It wants to scream its pain into the night and growl a warning to the world to back the fuck off because fire lives here.

And I could totally do that. Just not as part of normal, social grooming type  conversation. Conversations are not soapboxes.

I am still learning this.

Luckily, I have very good friends who are quite used to my particular brand of firebrand passion, and so they are not freaked out by it. Word cannot express how much I appreciate that. Like all writers, I was born with a burning need to communicate and being able to do so freely and in my own way does wonders for my soul and helps reduce the pressure of all of those words trying to get out.

That pressure can get pretty intense. It’s like one of the prerequisites of being a writer is the inability to let something we want to say go. The words all join the long, long lineup of other things we want to say about things and wait for their names to be called.

I can only assume that this is not how it works for most people. The non-writers of the world must be able to totally let go of whatever they want to express if they don’t get a chance to express it.

But I am deducing that logically. I can’t imagine living like that.  Like many writers, I am driven by the feeling that I have something to say.

It doesn’t matter that I often have no freaking idea what, exactly, I am trying to say. The urge, the itch, remains. And part of a writer’s artistic development hinges on writing  enough so that they can clear enough words out of their heads for them to finally be able to find what they really want to say.

It can take a lifetime to figure that out.

But like trying to find something in a cluttered garage, you have to clear a lot of other stuff out of the way before you can get to what you are looking for.

That’s why my biggest piece of advice to other writers is that writers write. If you are writing, you’re a writer, whether or not it’s any good. Indeed, whether or not another living soul ever sees it.

You’re not doing it for them. You’re doing it for you. It’s the only way to truly become a better writer. Get all the garbage out of your system so that you can find your true voice and figure out what you really want to say.

And it’s amazing how pretty much everyone reacts to this advice the same way : they pause thoughtfully and say “I guess… ” then go back to thinking about writing instead of actually doing it.

They react that way because my logic is flawless, so it can’t be immediately rejected, but the conclusion is unpalatable to them because it means they really should be actually writing and they are far too comfortable thinking about writing, which is easy and fun, as opposed to actually writing  which requires actual effort.

Well here’s the reality update, potential writers : if you are not writing, you are not a writer. You’re just someone who thinks about stuff. If you want to legitimately continue thinking of yourself as a writer, you better get your ass to writing.

Otherwise, you are just another self-deluded poser.

So write, goddamn it!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.