Singing

I am not motivated to write today. Every sentence is a chore.

Drag. Draaag.

And yet, Sunday after Sunday, motivation or not, “welcome to the show. I am so happy to be doing this. Oh, what a great life!”

That is what it must feel like to be wealthy.

Here’s one gag you will hear about writing, to a queasy degree: keep writing. Well, screw off, will ya? I say stop, and stop now.

But here’s what. You can. But I can’t. Don’t ask me why.

But why? Here’s Catullus:

I hate and I love
Why do I, you ask?
I don’t know, but it’s happening
and it hurts.

How many layers of irony does it take to warm a cold heart? I know all of this is a whole load of horseshit, and yet I can’t help coming back in search of a horse.

Why am I telling you all this? You see, I have this need. This, um, condition. I need to type something. They said if I worked with my hands, I’d be creative. My level of desperation wasn’t deep enough to take up knitting sweaters or making pots. My disillusionment about my self-awareness could only lead me here. To write.

In the beginning, it was great. You should read some of the earlier essays. You can see the work that went into it. Many many drafts. To make something out of it. At one point, I even considered doing this full time, but thank God for capitalism. Look at this now. Just look at this shit. I love it.

I found a great analogy which will make a good paragraph here, but I’ve decided it’s going to be a different essay. I need to save up. I can’t just give it all away. This is like a marriage; I need to hedge for a shortfall of hope in the future.

I have said a lot of shit about why I write. But really. To wake up and have something you don’t want to do and yet know of nothing else that can make your life seem urgent enough. To wake up to destroy all whys. To be fulfilled through emptiness.

The number of things I have written that I will never read again. Putting letters in a bottle and letting them float away. The only way to send love letters.

When I started, I needed a few things to make me feel like I mattered. Writing helped. Now I need things to make me feel like none of it matters. Writing helps.:

Words tug at my heart. I go where they lead me. Drag me. The days of pretending I don’t exist in the words: the days of wishing for better words—the days of stringing and unstringing the instrument: the days of convincing myself I am learning to sing.

And then the days, like today, of singing.