Author: Teel

I have been fighting with various versions of Moveable Type, trying to get the darn thing to work properly, and having a heck of a time. This post is basically just to test stuff, see what’s working, what’s not.

Every time I think I’m about to be able to be open and honest and not give a second thought about … whether what I say is okay to say… Things change. Hopes, washed away. Expectations and realities inconsistent. Realistic and unrealistic expectations alike, unmet and unequaled.

I have supposed to be writing. Last week, this long weekend, writing. But there is pressure, pre-emptive stress, internal conflict, and things have not gone to plan. And things not going to plan -writing and elsewise- diminish my ability to relax, to concentrate, to focus or to create. Poetry, fiction, even the ability to journal have been disenchanted, placed justoutof reach.

I say, I know, if I sit down at a blank page, a typewriter, a text input field of one sort or another, words come. The words are always there, waiting just behind my fingertips, waiting in the folds of my brain, waiting for me to give them a chance to face the world. In the last month I’ve tried writing here, I’ve tried saying something about my life, but without actually forcing myself to sit down in front of an input window I have been able to avoid actually writing anything. If there are other tabs in the browser, information to surf, to search, updated this or that, new sites to discover and explore, more and more and more than I could ever absorb, it’s easy to do that until I pass out, without a word written. If I can avoid bringing up the webpage to write into at all, that’s half a step further away.

Even the window I’m writing into now is a form of procrastination, avoidance, separation from the window behind it, the one I’m supposed to be developing fiction, characters, a family, their lives, their experiences into. A story I’d hoped would be book length seems to be pointing towards being a short story instead, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be written. And writing it is what I am not doing by writing this. You’ve read this before, a hundred times before.

((I’ve been thinking of going through my online journal and collecting my entries into a series of books. Not exhaustive, not every post, but -for example- start with the most intense and emotional posts and/or the posts to and about Sara for a start. Perhaps a collection about writing, all the thousands of words I’ve written about writing, about not writing, about putting off writing, and this. Perhaps. It can be compelling reading, I know, and it is true, true memoir sells, yes?))

So, in brief, I have not been writing because:

I failed to remain celibate, almost immediately, and in an on-going fashion.

I have been quite depressed, avoiding most social contact, turning inward and too deep in it to see much else.

I have been feeling defeatist about my own failure to market/sell my books & art, and know that “blogging” about it is not really going to work on its own.

I am still somewhat involved with Mandy, but we … we don’t really know what it is, or where it’s going, or what, so it’s hard to talk about. (I am at her flat right now, for example.)

I have been having difficulty focusing, concentrating, and more – I have been so scatterbrained that I haven’t written much until this break, nor worked on art nor much of anything else in months and months and months.

So.

I always say I’ll keep trying, right? So I’m saying it again: I’m going to try to write more. Here, and for my new stories and books. I’m going to try to work on art again. My brain wants to do something with tens of thousands of tiny, unique stickers, applied either to something vast and/or something sculptural, inspired by the stickers I’ve recently ordered from moo.com. I’m going to try to not give up on whatever is going on with Mandy as we move into her new school & new school year and into my trying to be productive again and not going too much more mad.

I have been very reluctant and dismissive for years of the suggestions and assistance which has been offered to me with re: marketing my art and my books. Please do not let me be. Force me to try. Make me go talk to Bookman’s, to Changing Hands, to go around to the independent book sellers in town and see if they will carry a local author’s books. Suggest publications to read, publications to submit my short fiction to, workshops, meetings, whatever, and if I dismiss them, put them in my hands. Put it in front of my face. Help me learn to … to have faith in myself. Because the real problem is that I don’t believe I’m good enough. The problem is that I worry that I’ll walk into Bookman’s and talk to them about putting my books in the Local Authors section and they’ll laugh at me or dismiss me or worse. The problem is that I’ve been so effectively discouraged by other people’s horror stories about rejection after rejection that I’ve never even tried – I’ve not sent a single short story or poem, let alone a novel, to a publisher, not ever. If the most brilliant writers were rejected hundreds of times, for years and decades and sometimes until after their deaths, what chance have I got? That’s my thinking, and I don’t know how to break out of it any time soon without your help.

Alright, I’m going to go try to write some more of this bizarre vampire story. Later, I’ll be at the Art Walk. Tomorrow, I’ll be in Pine, doing hard work, and then it’s another work week. Gotta keep going.

I was never much for pictures… for photographs, as it were… Just one of the things I don’t “get” and that no one seems to be able to explain to me. I tried for a while… I bought a reasonably nice SLR and a few accessories, and I … well, I worked myself through a few hundred photos I now don’t know what to do with. And my camera has had more use by family members in recent years than it ever got from me. And I still haven’t bought a digital camera. And I don’t go to flickr… or “get” flicker, for that matter… Although apparently it’s a big deal, apparently it’s well-enough-established among the younger generation that it’s like google, it’s just one of the basic assumed elements of what “internet” means. But most of the time when I’m “surfing” or whatever and I follow a link to something on flickr… I end up at some long essay, some blog post or political statement or manifesto, and … this, I get even less. There’s no photos there (that I can find), it’s just words… Why is this on flickr? Why did you start your political movement on flickr, of all places, if images aren’t even a part of it? Some of them even mention or link to their blogs – they HAVE blogs, they’re just … also using flickr… as a … blog? I don’t get it.

To me, well, I’m aware of flickr. It has something or other to do with photos, and with “Web 2.0” and with some “community” I’ll never be a part of. According to the front page there were “1,681 photos uploaded in the last minute” – this is crazy. I didn’t write this paragraph in the last minute.

What is it in my mind that doesn’t connect with these things that are so easy for other people? Snapshots, classifieds, gossip, and their digital counterparts (flickr, craigslist, blogging) just to name a few. I suppose it’s possible it’s just a problem of upbringing; if my family had participated actively in such as these, they would seem normal to me, right? And maybe if my family hadn’t been crazy, depressed, and poor, I wouldn’t be the same way.

This week I did a 24-lecture series on Nietzsche, and Wednesday night my head was swimming and as I was walking to my car, trying to cope with complex philosophical conundrums, my head took me back to basics and told me that if I wanted to know the meaning of life I ought to start with a kiss. I ought to give myself over completely to a kiss, experience myself lost totally in that connection. That’s how I used to teach philosophy. That’s a toehold, a foot in the door, an easy way to get at the truths that cannot be expressed effectively with words. I felt lost, unanchored, mentally and emotionally and spiritually, and the safe place to turn, to get my bearings, was a kiss.

But I got in my car and I drove home anyway.

Nietzsche apparently has a lot to say against all forms of asceticism, and it seemed pretty convincing as it rolled into my mind. Gave me a lot to think about, about the various asceticism I prescribe to, cling to. Unstuck.

I have friends who can lose a job and find a new one faster than I can make up my mind about whether to kiss a beautiful woman. I have friends who don’t know how or whether they can afford treatment for their depression, but who go anyway; I know at least three different ways my insurance covers therapy for me, but I stand frozen in depression for years at a time. At least I have friends, I suppose.

Last weekend went fast, but this week may have gone by even faster, somehow. I was telling someone recently about how my perception of time wasn’t entirely normal, how the time from when I wake up Sunday morning to the time I get home from work Wednesday is effectively like a single moment in time. That it then usually takes a day (or a night, if I stay up late Wednesday, like tonight) to unwind from the time-compressed week. That I often lose half or more a day on Saturday, mentally crippled due to the impending work week. Such that what I was explaining at the time was that if I saw someone every weekend, it feels to me like seeing them every day. At the time I said it, I didn’t mean it quite as literally as it seems to have been for me, this week. But here’s another weekend.

I don’t have any hard plans… Maybe I’ll try to … illustrate … something … for Dragons’ Truth book cover? I don’t know. Maybe play video games for a change, try to relax. Try not to spend money. It has occurred to me that maybe I should try to write something instead of always only focusing on my already written books. I think it’s part of my conceptual idea for Modern Evil Press to have new books all the time. Alas. I probably ought to go to bed soon. I say this on account of Heath, my nocturnal, grave-yard-shirt-working brother just said HE has to go to bed. Oh well. No more terrible movies for tonight, I guess.