Excuses for not writing Monday, Sep 5 2011

Life is what you make it – boring people are bored – and a trip to wherever, no matter how exciting, would not change what you are… which is a person who is frustrated by their own inability to do anything.

I’m not talking about human potential, I am talking about what you actually do.

Here it is, once and for all, plain and fucking simple.  You must write!  If you do not start writing, you will never be a writer.  If you do not start writing now, you will never develop the skills a writer requires on the way to becoming a great writer.  If you do not start writing, you will waste your self.  You may die tomorrow, so write today.

Work hard, but relax with people.

Why wait to get a degree?

Why wait for spring?  Jesus is coming so wear something waterproof.  What the hell is a university degree going to do?  A degree will not put a pen in your hand (a Mac keyboard under your finger tips) and form the letters, the words, the tangents, that make writing such a joy.  A degree will not discipline you to work eight hours a day at something that is fulfilling to your soul and can even entertain your friends.  You have to do all that and you have to derive satisfaction from it.

To me, a university degree with your name on it, mounted, framed, behind glass, hanging on a wall (no matter how prominent), would tell me no story that you could write.  It would signify that you attained a level of education, but it would not convey any of your inner feelings.  In fact, the message I would get as I looked up at it would be, “This is what you used as an excuse so that you could continue to deny that it wasn’t a lack of education that was preventing you from perusing what you want to do, it is you.  If you go on like this, your degree will eventually be a B.S.D. – Bachelor of Self Denial.

Wake up.  Fuck the degree as an excuse shit.  By all means enjoy the university courses for what they teach you, what you learn, what you understand, and, above all, the thoughts that they provoke.  Just don’t think that once you get the sheepskin, you going to be able to sit down and write an epic.  And fuck off with this from a fulfilled life will come great works’ shit because in my experience, all that comes from being fulfilled is that you fall asleep with a smile on your face and wake a few hours later wanting more and the snoring signifies that you’ll have to wait, but don’t buy skates yet because Hell isn’t going to free over.

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The Great Pretenders Sunday, Apr 25 2010

I used to know a woman who came to our country.  In her country, she was nothing because she was a woman.  She knew this and this made her insane.  Who wouldn’t be?

In coming to the new country she decided she would re-invent herself, which she promptly did.  She dreamed of what she wanted to be and she would become this.  She invented a new history, an education and career that she would have had, had she been born in a country that gave dignity to women.

First she imagined her resume.  Because in the country where she now made her home, everybody had a resume – even women.  You are, she thought, what your resume revealed.  “I think, therefore I am,” some famous French philosopher had once declared.  Of course, she had never read the works of the French philosopher and had never heard of these words.  But she thought and therefore she believed that she was.

Her new resume revealed an illustrious past consisting of journalism and extensive forays into the world of fashion.  Every job she had had in her glorious “past”, led into the next one; when one job ended, another one started.  According to her resume, she had never been unemployed.  Never spent time searching for new work.  People who read her resume gasped with surprise and awe, especially at the luck of someone in a third world nation.

On her new curriculum vitae she stated her education  of two Masters degrees, in art and  in literature.  She had managed, while working at her brilliant career to somehow attain two Masters degrees.  People were in awe.  But her friends never heard her speak of her days at school, or her thesis, or the books she had read or the art she had studied.  The people around her were in awe.

She invented a new history of herself.  She became an artist of re-invention.  She became a work-in-progress.  For a time she felt victory because she thought she had fooled everyone.

She began a blog and told people about her blog.   For the longest time, her blog was a collection of stolen articles.  She even told people that a writer from CNN would be writing on her blog.  This was, in part, true.  Articles from CNN began to appear on her blog.  And then, one day,  she began to write.

The articles on her blog stirred up feelings in the readers of sadness, of patheticness.  They were painful stories to read.  The articles were a swirl of mish-mashed, convoluted thoughts and incorrect punctuation.  It was as if someone abusing a controlled substance had sat down at the computer and began to type whatever came into their heads.  There was no hint of the journalist she had once pretended to be.

What gave her the greatest pain was the lies and the untruths she had to tell.  Sometimes she forgot her lies and people would think of how the story had changed.  She sometimes sensed that particular people could see through her and this ate her inside.  Her stomach would twist in knots at night, her thoughts, her failures would spin endlessly in her mind.  How could she maintain this facade?

She dreamed of glory in her new homeland, but it didn’t come quickly.  Like everyone else, in a new country which gives dignity to all people, one must also work at their goals and have something to back them up.  Sometimes, dreams and imagination are not enough.

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