FUCK ME

Sorry for the vulgar title, but it's early morning on a Saturday, I'm drunk on a glass of 4 dollar wine that is turning my spit purple, and I feel a need to vent, now. Shit, I feel the need for a typographic enema (is that an appropriate adjective?).

My second to last post is about a new story, and how I did it so fast. Well, I haven't done shit since writing that story, just typed it up, edited it one and a half times, (I went over the first half twice, having made an aborted edit) and printed it out just today. That's fucking it.

Oh, and I wrote a page of a third draft of some thing that I am keeping on the back burner, and only thought to revisit because it was evoked by Pattern Recognition, the latest Gibson novel I have read (It's very good, maybe his best; I liked it better than Spook Country, I think, though I only listened to that on Audiobook. I think Gibson is at his best when using a single focalized character. His ensemble pieces aren't as hooking).

Since then, I have gotten bogged down in a laborious job search, characterized more my procrastination than actual searching, during which I tried to get a job as an insurance salesman, succeeded, then decided I didn't want to do it. That makes two jobs that I have gotten and turned down, no jobs that I have actually gotten. Meanwhile, I failed somehow to make it through the initial interview stage for a online application at Best Buy, thought that might have been a computer fuckup, maybe, on my part, and the application didn't go through. And I haven't gotten any callbacks on the shitjobs I applied for last Friday.

In short, I have been feeling depressed, useless, and lazy for the last 20 days or so. I have gotten nothing done. My jobsearch has gone from a lazy procrastination to a selfhating freakout. I have no interest in getting a job. I have no interest in getting fucked by the system, or fucking others with the system. The entire American economy has, for a long time, felt like a series of commutations of exploiting and being exploited, and I don't want anything to do with any of it. I am unhappy, feel useless, uninspired, frightened, and angry. I hate this entire fucking economy and want nothing to do with it, feel both uninspired and disinterested in trying to have anything to do with it, guilty, and wanting to, if anything, be exploited by it, just so as not to be past of the monster, and horribly depressed and frightened and angry that, in twenty days of not getting a job, I have managed to do fuck all in terms of writing.

Now, I am listening to Sinead O'Connor, enjoying feeling properly drunk for the first time in ages. It's good, I think, to get drunk every so often. Let the demons out to fly and around and access the decorating, give it their honest opinion, break anything that doesn't seem to be doing much good.

My friends visited last weekend. Sunday night Boyle and Craig inexplicably, in an act of spur-of-the-moment initiative, drove all the way out to Iowa City, harassed me, and took me out for breakfast at eleven at night, then drove back. Boyle now has a shit-paying job with possibility for advancement. Craig is dating the Hot Polish Chick at Follett. All they did was harass me, probably because I am in an pitiable shit state, and such was obvious. I haven't gotten a job in nearly three fucking months. They questioned why I moved out here. Like most point blank questions, I stuttered and gave answers that felt like fake justifications.

I feel like my entire life has been a waste. I have no idea why I am doing anything that I am doing. I feel that every day I am sinking deeper and deeper into depression and melancholy. I feel alone and frightened. The entire world, all of my surroundings, feel like a foreign country, transplanted to an alien world with odd, idiosyncratic customs. I want out. I don't like it here. I keep waiting for it all to make sense and it never does, just feels more and more alien. Why can't I get on something that feels like that right track. Is it me? It is the rest? Do I even want to?

I don't want to sell insurance. I don't want to be here. I don't want to fake being a person. I just want to be a fucking writer.

So why can't I even manage that?

Johnny Mnemonic

I was pleased recently to find out that William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic is posted online in it's entirety, here, since this gave me the chance to read the story from the comfort of my chair without paying money, or sitting in a bookstore or something.


I was pleased, reading it, because it's really not all that great. The movie might actually be a better story, minus the fact that it doesn't have Molly. I mean, it's very creative, laying out many, if not most, of the ideas and concepts and social commentary that would pop up in Neuromancer (except for cyberspace). But the story is just not that engaging. There's really no sense of building tension, it's kind of disjointed.

That said, Gibson is pretty good at the basic mechanics of writing. The final fight between Molly and the vatgrown Yakuza assassin is really well told. It's just that Gibson took the concept of "start as late in the story as possible" to its extreme, and as a result there is really no connection with the main character. I read the entire story not giving a shit that I knew the narrator was going to get offed shortly after the narration closes. That's bad.

Still, better than Pynchon's early short fiction. I think I just like novels better than short stories.

Also, I just wanted to point out that the story is really good if one is a Molly fan. It think this is the most ass-kicking she does in any story. Which is funny, because while this is Molly at her most consistently ass-kicking, she is less badass than she is in either Neuromancer or Mona Lisa Overdrive. Just not as scary and psychopathic.

Bullshit

I think this blog might actually be helping me with the writing process, to a degree. Composing short bits where I try to express my point as quickly as possible and move on, has, I think, helped cut out the bullshit from my writing. Which really, there is no need for, because there is always someone who will spot a piece of bullshit if it's there.

Best just to get an idea out there as quick as possible and move on.

New Story!

You see that post, down below? Where I tell myself I should get some writing done. Well, it worked, and I did. This weekend, I have written an entire short story. Whole cloth. First draft. Okay, it's not finished, yet, in the sense that it's not typed yet. It's about 16 or 17 pages in a notebook. Still, that's in incredible feat of writing to get done in one weekend. And it's good. I like it. The changes that need to be made are very minor, almost nonexistent. And also, it the first peice done of my wider Life's Work piece that I am always off -and-on thinking about. It feels like just to have a part of it committed to paper. There is a warm feeling of contentment infusing my body (that might be beer).

Also, I think I am getting closer and closer to my voice. When writing this, I felt like I was learning to turn off my critical voice, my second-guessing voice, and just write the story, knowing what was important, what would have to come. And it worked. I would say that 95 % of the things I thought had to be in there have ended up there. I mean, this thing will need like two edits only, probably. One when I type it and one when I proofread. And it's shorter than the long ass crap that I am writing the rest of the time. Which is nice.

Today is a Game Day.

My car is stuck in the driveway, another car parked behind. I am trapped here.

I should probably get some writing done.