My Whole Expanse I Cannot See…

I’m not okay. I’m so fucking not okay.

So, I’ve been reading The Narrator by Michael Cisco, one of the most brilliant writers putting down words today. I’ve been reading The Narrator for… awhile. For me, Michael Cisco doesn’t write the sort of books one flies through. At least, I definitely don’t fly through them. His prose are thick, the words are almost heavy in your head, but this is because the images he creates with the words are so vivid, and real, and often yet so very dream-like, or nightmarish. He takes scenes of dream and nightmare, with all the inherent incoherence and impossibility that the human mind can create intimately, in the dark, and puts those scenes on paper in words. I don’t rush through words like that, I want to take them all in, to see the images they’re creating.

When I do finish The Narrator, I’ll review it, but really, just go buy it. I don’t think Cisco will fall on his face during the second half.

I’ve said that I admire Elliott Smith as a writer, I think he was a genius. He’s a writer whose level of brilliance I aspire toward. He captured human experiences so perfectly, told these perfect little stories of love and loss and sadness and loneliness and addiction in just a few hundred words. Theres’s a special skill in that, no less brilliant and beautiful than the tens of thousands of words that writers like KJ Bishop, or Michael Cisco, or Jeff VanderMeer put into their stories.  It’s not easy to capture how it feels to lose someone you love, to capture it in a way that is universally accessible, in just a handful of words. Smith’s Sweet Adeline off his fourth record, XO, is a gorgeous example of describing the end of love and the aftermath of that ending.

Waiting for sedation to disconnect my head, for any situation where I’m better off than dead.

He felt that, put it into words, perfect words. It’s how I feel right now, and a thousand times before right now, and probably a thousand times after right now.

So, this woman I’ve loved for a very long time, years, she’s quit me. It’s, I’ve earned it, I think. I don’t know. I just have to face it, and deal with it, and not break. I really cannot break. I just have to not break.

So, the last two posts are some nonsense, but it’s grammatically correct nonsense. I’m just trying to write, anything. Elliott Smith has this song, New Monkey, and the one line that always really gets me goes, “got a whole lot of empty time left to go, now you’ve gotta’ fill it with something…” Then it ends, “Anything is better than nothing…” It’s a very autobiographical song, a big theme is the idea of being unhappy, being fucked up, but writing anyway. He was a musician, but his songs are often about writing. I see him as a writer, his writing is tattooed all over me.

Anyway, I’m trying to fill that empty time, and trying to be me again.

So, I just noticed the blog had 13 categories, which I decided couldn’t be good. It’s just not a savory number, 13, nothing good ever came of it. The horror fiction-sphere cannot be wrong. Example, one of my favorite movies is 1408, a movie about an “evil fucking room,” a hotel room. The rest of the hotel was fine, people loved the pillow mints, great amenities, it was just that one room, 1408, it killed people. Well, 1+4+0+8= 13. It’s just not a number to have around. To fix this issue, I’ve trashed a category. Turtle Erotica is no more, on account of the fact that aside from the one story, I doubt I’ll ever write about turtles having sex ever again. It’s just not in the cards.

12 categories, much safer.

It’s been weeks, weeks and weeks since I’ve written here. This place is such a shadow of what it used to be, it’s such a wandering ghost. It really does haunt me. I mean, I remember just writing whatever was in my head and it felt good after I wrote. I always felt less heavy inside, and people who stumbled upon the words tended to like reading them. I’ve just been lost, really, really lost. I want to be found. Who’s going to find me?

This place reflects me, this place is empty. What’s that say about me for the last long while? Or maybe I’m not empty, it’s really more that, I’m so full of things that I hate. I have done things that I hate, things that I never thought I’d do. Horrible things that make me feel black inside. I never set out to do something bad, I don’t think that I’m inherently a bad person, but I might feel better if I were. I wouldn’t feel guilt over anything, I wouldn’t feel any empathy toward who I hurt. My soul wouldn’t feel like it’s deformed.

Given enough stress and enough loneliness, history shows that I’m going to make bad decisions. I need to not do that, maybe starting right now. Used to be, I’d just go drink enough vodka or bourbon to kill a pony. That was so much simpler, just sort of a self-destructive thing that depressed writers in particular seem really keen on. Those days I miss, comparatively speaking. This other lapse, it’s so far from the me in my head, I can’t, I cannot believe I went down that road, several times. Something really bad happened to me as a result of the last time and I earned that scar and that’s fine. I know I’m kind of rambling, writing without really showing anything. I just, I want everything to be unfucked. I want to just be a good person, I want to do good things. I am genuinely sorry to someone, I won’t repeat the wrongs again. I don’t want to carry the sin anymore.

I don’t know how it got to all this. I only want one simple thing in the entire fucking world. I feel like I’m running out of time, so fast. I’m scared.