The Desire to Write Grows With Writing

That’s a quote from something Erasmus that popped up after I posted yesterday. It’s true I think. The more I write the more I want to write. But I wonder when this Erasmus wrote that. Did he mean to say that the more one writes the more they want to write or did he mean something else…since maybe he wrote that before many people can write.

It’s amazing to think that, aside from the obviously crazy fact that anyone can publish anything, to think that everyone or basically everyone can read and write now. It’s a much different world. And crazy for the kids, our kids, who will have access to all of our histories in detail so rich I don’t know how they’ll handle it. Probably just ignore most of it I guess as they’ll be bombarded with their own pictures and such and obsessed with their own lives. Then again obsession with yourself could lead to reading the history of your family.

My feet are so cold. The ground out there is colder than ice. My coworker is trying to get me to cover for him again. He just texts me things like “Do it.” He sounds really mean in his texts and then acts really nice in person…except when he doesn’t. He’s like some kind of emotional bully.

I’ve been thinking of something I tell myself when the shit hits the fan at work: Embrace the chaos. I forget where I heard that first, or read it first, maybe it was in this book about finding the right career for yourself by wandering called “You Majored in What?” But anyway, maybe that’s what I have to do in life. I often feel like I’m not getting the things done I should, like I haven’t called my parents and other people, and I feel like these things build up and are going to come back and bite me in the ass. But that’s how I feel on a smaller scale a lot of the time during dinner service, but if I just go with it, embracing the chaos of the immediate moment, somehow at the end of the night everything gets done. Some people leave unhappy with the service I suppose but most people are A-OK.

I also looked at Seth Godin’s blog yesterday and today, after it came up in my post yesterday. And I started getting discouraged. All of his posts have genius ideas in them. And he always makes me feel like I should do more. I should “ship” something. And I suppose he’s right. And I was sure he was right yesterday and this morning and I was getting more and more down on myself. I thought, “This essay thing will never work. Nobody cares about it. It pretty much sucks since a thousand people have already said exactly what I’m going to say. There’s probably thirty books out on the front table at Barnes and Noble with this exact story in them. I should do something people are actually going to be interested in…like…shit…fuck I don’t know anything that interests anyone! How could I possibly think I could entertain or inform anyone when I haven’t done shit with my life!” This isn’t Seth Godin’s intention I’m sure. Probably he’d rather I did the opposite and actually create something, if I asked him his opinion on the matter and he had time to answer. But for some reason, this is how his blog effects me. And not only that, there are so many good ideas one right after the other, that my feeble mind can’t keep track of all of them, and in the end I don’t remember a single thing! Or so it seems. I do remember if I really think about it, some things, but the effect of all those brilliant ideas one after another like a machine gun is daunting and I lose track of the one really good idea I got when I first started reading. Of course he posts only once a day unlike me, so if you follow the blog every day you’ll have all day to consider each idea. But anyway.

Some needs we cannot ignore. Like I just walked into my house with the bottoms of my pants wet and my feet cold and starving hungry but I didn’t worry about any of that. I didn’t hardly take my coat of just sat down and started writing. Until I suddenly had to use the bathroom like a mother fucker. And I couldn’t ignore that. And while I was away from the computer I changed my pants put on some slippers and threw these hand warmers in there, too. Never used them before and the idea just struck me. I’ve had them around for years, my mom got them for me as a Christmas gift. So fuck it.

Also, maybe the reason I haven’t gotten anything written is that I don’t have an editor. Maybe if I had an editor who got on me about deadlines and also took everything I typed and made some kind of sense out of it, like Hunter Thompson’s editor did for him, and Thomas Wolfe’s did for him, then maybe I could have some reputable shit.

But back to whatever I was talking about before. Yeah so I was getting discouraged and finally I said to myself, Fuck it. You came in this game with nothing and you found out some interesting shit and you’re writing more than you’ve written in a long time. You’ve been reading Seth’s blog for five years and it never once gave you the satisfaction that you’ve gotten these last two weeks of blogging yourself. The infuriating thing is that everything I say to myself, I can hear Seth Godin saying, “That’s what I was saying all along!” I know I know Christ! Just let me have my own moment okay fuck! Jesus got damn it mother fucker I can’t get any peace around here! All these mother fuckers in my head talking nonsense. In all probability I will never have a real conversation with Seth Godin and yet I can’t type some shit that I feel without deferring to him and apologizing in advance.

It’s like a curse. I always try to see both sides of an argument, and therefore I never argue. Even when arguing would be healthy and productive.

Also I lie a lot, like everyone, to keep up appearances. Even to an extreme degree. Like my parents don’t know that I’m not a hardcore evangelical Christian. And it’s strange that I have this memory of getting in trouble and my dad asking me why I didn’t do some chore or other, and I worked up my courage and said, “I didn’t feel like it.” I didn’t say it smart, because I was afraid as fuck of my dad, but I really wanted to answer his question honestly. Damn it my parents were always asking, “Why did you do that? Answer me! Why?” I don’t know! “You don’t know? You don’t know! I’m going to don’t know your butt!” So I thought that time, shit, I’m going to god damn well answer him. So I thought about why I didn’t do the chore and all I could come up with was that I didn’t feel like doing it, honestly. So I said that and he was SUPER PISSED. He put me in my room for the rest of the day and whatever else and I remember walking around my room crying saying to myself ” at least I was honest! I was just trying to be honest!” Ha my childhood looks pretty tragic when you put it like that. But for whatever reason that stayed with me, I was like eight or something, and now it would be nice to link my penchant for lying with the discovery I apparently made that day about what being honest gets you. I lie all the time now and no one ever gets mad at me. They would if I didn’t lie because then they would know that I actually think they’re an idiot. Or what have you. It’s probably too simple to say that triggered the web of lies I’m in these days, but it’s a neat story anyway.

And my blog has flat lined. At least for the past few hours no one’s looked at it. I’m a sad panda.

But anyway…fuck it. Time to do some research.

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