Sunday, October 20, 2019

Sunday, October 20, 2019

 Sunday morning coming down. First one in a long time without a net, and it's not so bad. Granted, I spent most of the day reading Ambrose Bierce, watching the Saints, and napping, so what do I know.



 Tomorrow will mark five months I've been doing... whatever this is. I'm thinking once I hit six months, I'm going to start giving myself a day off. Not from writing, but from this. I'll use that day to try to work on fiction. Something's got to give soon, because I really can't just piddle around like this for too much longer.

 I do need to come up with something, really. Fiction, journalism, that "website copy" thing my young friend in Athens mentioned, I need to start doing something besides just piddling around. This is fun, it really is, but it does bother me a bit that this might be all I can do.

 But is that a bad thing? Unless something drastic happens - and something drastic could very well happen, of course - I really don't need to work anymore. At some point, I'm going to have trouble with my heart due to the high blood pressure (it damaged my left ventricle before I learned about it) and I'm going to have to do something with my teeth before it's over with. I won't go into great detail - because it's none of your business - but for the most part, I'm pretty comfortable and since I have a good safety net, even if things go south, I'll still have a place to live.

 So is it ego? Shame? A desire to create? What is it? I don't know. When I quit writing a decade or so ago, I came to the decision that not everyone had to be a creator. The world - especially the artistic/entertainment world - needs consumers. Art needs someone to appreciate it, otherwise what's the point. If art holds a mirror up to life, if no one is looking into the mirror, does art really exist?

 Hell, I don't know. I'm not an artist. When I played in bands, I didn't consider myself a musician. My brother's a musician, he creates. I just played in bands and had fun. When I wrote on a regular basis, I never considered myself an artist. Yes, writers can be artists. Read A Hundred Years Of Solitude and tell me that's not art. Not everything Faulkner wrote was art, but The Sound And The Fury was. Fight me.

 Regardless, I always considered myself a journalist, even when what I was doing couldn't be considered straight journalism. When I felt fancy, I'd call myself a "storyteller" telling other people's stories and even that was a facet of journalism, especially with how I approached it.

 One thing I picked up on my Big Trip is that I still had it in me to get stories out of people. I didn't make any notes because, frankly, I didn't do it on purpose. That's just how I deal with the world when I can't avoid it: keep attention away from me by having someone else talk about themselves, and everyone has a story.

 But believe you me, friends and neighbors, I do not want to interview people anymore. Everyone may have a story, but sometimes getting that story out is like pulling teeth. And frankly, what I do to avoid the world isn't something I want to put myself through on a regular basis. Plus, one of the reasons I became a writer is I never wanted to wallow around too much in the ocean of humanity. Pulling a J.D. Salinger sounded good to me, boy.

 Anyhow, enough of that. What's in the News? Anything new and interesting. Well... not really. Trump's dropped his push to hold next year's G-7 at his bedbug-ridden fleatrap Doral, and he's been bellyaching about it. The mean ol' Democrats and the cruel, heartless Media isn't letting the big baby make money off this regular meeting of world leaders. Poor thing.

 What else? Well, the Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight continues to crumble in the face of possible Impeachment and, if nothing else, continues to make themselves look like damn fools. People keep trying to paint Trump as some sort of slick conman playing 4th-dimensional chess, but honestly? He's a moron and he's always been a moron who got by because he was born into filthy poverty. Anyone who chooses to work with him are equally dumb or equally crooked, and that's a hard nut to make in the bloody world of Washington politics, even with the head start the Corporate Media gives rich assholes who want to keep assholes rich.

 This round of the Sleep is beating me down, I'm not going to lie. Whether I use the Machine or not doesn't really seem to make a difference, I can always go back to sleep. If I must stick with political ruminations, I don't want to concentrate solely on the outrageous dipstick in the White House, as easy as he makes things. But as tired as I am, I really can't do much more. Seeing the pulmonary specialist this week, so maybe something new will come out of it.

 In the meantime, hope your weekend was pleasant and next week won't be too nasty.

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