God, do I not feel like writing right now.
But now is the time for Writing Part 1, and so the writing shall be done.
Habit is repetition, after all.
And discipline is habit with its big boy pants on.
That’s not funny
More on why I can’t seem to find myself funny.
In the sense of being able to turn my mental illness into comedy like so many others, I mean. I find myself absurd all the time for the dumb stuff I do out of my general mental fogginess or when I catch myself in a petty vanity of some sort.
And like most funny depressed people (but I repeat myself), I can self-deprecate from here to eternity and back in time for lunch. I will gladly cop to being lazy, absent-minded, wimpy, so out of shape I’m non-Euclidian, and fatter than a CEO’s bonus.
And that’s just for starters.
But I still can’t see myself cracking wise about my depression. It’s not funny to me yet. I guess I can’t ironically detach from it like I do with everything else.
Besides, again like with a lot of funny type people, my comedy is an escape from my depression. I learned to make myself laugh as an antidote for being sad. Making other people laugh is even better. That bypasses my anhedonia.
Sure, I might be incapable of feeling pleasure and joy, but you’re not, and I can feel your jollies through my fully functional empathy, so I can truly say making other people happy makes me happy.
It seems like a cruel irony that I can’t turn my depression into comedy. Not yet, anyhow. There has never been a better time for comedy about mental illness, the more nakedly confessional the better, and I could totally rock that vibe if I could just manage to find something funny about being stuck playing video games for my entire life so far.
But it’s not funny. It’s bone-crushingly sad. Pitiful, really. I am sure I could make people feel bad for me but so what? That wouldn’t make me any happier, and as for them, why would they want to hear that?
I’d just be bumming people out for no good reason.
No, comedy is the only route for me. But I have so little substance to work with. My days are very low on events. My life is more or less a succession of nearly identical days of playing video games and blogging and occasionally jerking off.
I have all this intellect and insight and all these amazing things going on in my head and yet this magnificent engine of wonder between my ears just idles while I mindlessly and monotonously entertain myself.
And yet it’s worse than useless to flail myself over it. That moves me in the opposite direction, making me even less likely to turn outward and create.
So what WOULD help? Feeling comfortable and safe, basically. Then I could relax enough to let my creative juices flow.
But I have no idea how I convince myself to relax. To feel safe. To SLEEP.
Speaking of which, time to give CPAP another try.
More after the break.
Hello shadow, my old friend
That version is like what all good heavy metal should be like : dark, dramatic, and deep.
Basically, heavy metal should be like Klingon opera.
Feeling dark and shadowy in a lazy kind of way. Not so much shadowy as shady. Like a nice shaded spot by a tree on a gorgeous summer day.
Most of the time, it is deliciously cool and the perfect cozy haven to watch the sunlit world from and enjoy the vast blue sky and the sounds of summer fun around you and the delectable aroma of other people’s barbecuing.
But every now and then, at random moments, the wind blows a little bit harder and suddenly your deliciously cool grotto turns a bit too cold and you shiver as a chill shimmies up and down your spine and reminds you that no matter how bright the day, dark is the night, and night will be coming soon.
Jesus, I should be a poet. I mean, throw some more line breaks into those last two paragraphs and it would fit in at any poetry event.
I enjoy writing it, too. Obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t keep doing it spontaneously when I sit down to write whatever.
It’s just that poetry always seemed like a dead end to me. The number of people who can actually make a living as a poet in the entire world wouldn’t fill a high school gym.
The rest of us would be lucky to have a couple friends buy our chapbook or whatever, and are mostly just pests with day jobs and pretensions.
This does not make for an appealing career path.
Then again, money is not necessarily the only reason to do things. If I could find an online community where my work could be read and appreciated – or hell, read and pitilessly torn to shreds, that’s good too.
Negative attention is still attention, after all.
Honestly, I just want people to read me. That’s how it is for us antisocial writer types : writing is our somewhat stunted way of communicating with the world, so we churn out words in our dank dark caves and drafty garrets and then, when we have a big enough pile of them, suddenly realize we have to convince people to read them or the whole thing kind of falls apart.
And that’s unfortunate, because we are…. not good at that kind of thing.
Heck, if we were the kind of person who was good at selling themselves, we probably wouldn’t have become writers in the first place.
That’s why literary agents exist, I guess. And I could try to get one of those.
That also requires a great deal of selling oneself, but if it succeeds, you never have to do it again.
I will ponder it.
And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.