Saturday, November 24, 2012
LAYING MYSELF BARE, WHY I WRITE DARKNESS
Someone once asked me why I don’t write anything happy or funny. I am happy sometime, I’m funny—or so I’ve been told. Johnny Cash had his black outfits, his dark songs (skip the bullshit gospel junk). I have my stories. I wish I didn’t sometimes. Most of my stories are ripped right from my life in some capacity. In “Tom Ford, the Girl, and Rejection” he loses his family. Ditto. In “The Numbness” he encounters his father corpse, a man he hated all his life. Ditto. In “The Surrogate” she longs to have loving family minus an insane mother and abusive father. Ditto. In the yet unpublished “A Patch of Earth, a Spot of Sky” he tries, and for the most part is unsuccessful, to come to terms with showing feelings of sadness for someone he’d admired. I could go on and on… I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve never had that feeling of contentment. I’m 39, about halfway finished with my life. I’m alone. I’m pretty much broke for the time being. I worry constantly about the next catastrophe to come down the pipeline. Women, the one’s I’d be interested in are married, attached, or more messed up than myself. Some of the them enjoy my company when it’s necessary to get a fix of feeling good about themselves and then they move on. I’m left alone again. But I condone it through my actions so I must get that fix as well. It’s not a happy time. Therefore, I write. And it’s during the shitty times that I write the most. So maybe someday I’ll not write at all because I’m content. Or maybe I’ll write that sweet story that must be inside of me. It’ll be my own version of that Johnny Cash gospel music phase. Until then, I’m the man in black.
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Writing seems to require giving up on love and marriage. But the writing doesn't come in at 3 am and lie about where it was.
ReplyDeleteI don't think it requires giving up those things, but it's certainly easier to write without them. It frees up time and leads to bouts of depression, when I write the most.
DeleteI'm a strange mix of optimist and hopelessness. I relate to the writing when things are down.
ReplyDeleteAlso. I think writing is like any other career driven job: love and marriage isn't impossible, but it requires a different path and a different understanding. I mean, poetry sold out to love ages ago - love or lack of love is always and will always be a part of writing. Cheers.
I tend to write the most when I'm down, and it's usually the lack of anyone in my life that causes my being down. So the worst thing for my writing is being in a relationship. I'm happy, distracted, getting sex, etc. But when that ends, like last week, I feel my brain churning again. It's a really weird feeling, connecting to myself when there is no other choice. What does that say about me?
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