I need to rant. Skip it if you want.

 I'm going to piss and moan for a few pages. Skip if you don't care, and don't try to bullshit me, you don't.

 I'm not going into details because no one cares but one person, and I don't really want to hurt that person's feelings because they're just doing their jobs. It's the same thing like with my last manager. They weren't trying to make my job too frustrating to be worth a damn and it's as much my disposition as anything.

 But I am tired of this shit. All of it. Momma asks me why I sleep so much, and the real answer is I don't want to have anything to do with anything. I've been dealing with suicidal ideation since I was a teenager - three decades of that particular party - but the main reason I would happily end it all is that I don't want to deal with anything anymore. If I could figure out a guaranteed way that wouldn't fuck up someone else's day or make too much a mess, I would in a heartbeat, too.

 I think I'm going to have to give Twitter a rest. People are fucking stupid and dull and unoriginal and boring and if the world wants to go to Hell, I'm inclined to let it do so. Between Trump's idiocy, the GOP's venality, the average schmuck's insistence that COVID-19 is no big deal and that cops should be allowed to be as brutal as they want, it tires me.

 And then there's this work bullshit. Without going into detail, I'm doing content creation for websites people would access for legal advice. I've got 15 years experience in newspapers and a bachelor's degree in journalism. I know how to write something from an original source and not plagiarize. However, whoever's doing the final editing is marking things because they might be notched by Google. I'm not using other professional legal services - and I never know how many there were before I started this gig - I'm going to the sources they use. Some phrases are not going to be changed without losing their coherency and it's not my fault there are so few ways to express these things. So they want me to change shit so Google doesn't throw it out or what have you, and frankly, the more I do it, the more pissed off I get.

 I think regardless of how things work on the other end of this gig, I'm going to remove myself from the scene. I do not need to get this angry, this stutteringly furious over something I give such a small shit about. I don't need the money. I don't need to work. If I wanted to do nothing but sleep, I could probably get away with it.

 What's really pissing me off, though, is I've been doing this whatever it is for over a year now, and I can't shake the feeling that I'm wasting my time. I actually enjoy writing. Hell, doing this little bit of bitching is doing wonders for the rage headache I've been developing all day. I don't mind so much it not bringing any money in. It's nice, but it's not necessary. I just want to know if there's a fucking point to it all.

 I started doing this with the idea of doing something different than what I've always done. I didn't want to write about music or the media or politics and my own life isn't interesting enough. I wanted to do fiction of some kind. But what has come out? Stuff about music, the media, politics, and the terminal dullness that is my existence. Any attempts at fiction wither on the vine.

 And I can't convince myself that I am a writer. When I worked for newspapers and magazines, even when I started freelancing, I defined myself as a writer. After I quit, I quit calling myself a writer. A writer writes, so it made sense to me. So now that I'm writing at least 500 words a day - sometimes up to 2,500 and more than once, at that - I am a writer, now. Right? I mean, doesn't that count for something?

 I don't feel like a writer, though. I still feel like a fraud. All the books on writers I read and quotes about writers I see sound as foreign as intense discussions on cars. I'm familiar but it isn't talking to me. I don't know how to make it work. It's frustrating as hell. Frustrating and tiresome, and I'm tired of doing it. If no one cares - and it'd be tough to convince most of the hits I get here aren't connected to the porn spam left in the comments - and it feels like a fraud, why do I bother?

 I don't know. The real problem is I don't know what to do about. I don't have much left to give up. I’m 45 years old, man. The good times are over and I don’t see anything ahead of me but pain.