Sep 24, 09 10:36 AM
Every Fucking Day I Fucking Write the Fucking Book.
I'm trying to write a book. Well, no, actually somebody gave me a bunch of money to write a book, so I am writing a book. It's one of those terrible books where a guy does a bunch of drugs and then doesn't do drugs anymore.
One of my angles is that my stories aren't that of a bad-ass. No jail, no fights, no guns--not even needles, those handy symbols of degradation. Just comic mishaps and unexpected poignancies. It's kind of like Candide, if Candide was the story of one guy detoxing in a studio apartment, occasionally visited by a very cordial drug dealer in a leather jacket the color of butter.
No, I'm being facetious. I have lots of good stories--funny and odd stories. I hope to subtly blow the lid off the kind of James-Frey-tough-guy stories that drug narratives usually are; to be self-deprecating, to expose the haplessness of the life.
Like all recovering addicts, most of my friends are recovering addicts; half of them have tales of prisons and violence, while the other half's tales, though no more harrowing, are like mine--sad and wan.
Blogging, as an art form, isn't as fun as micro-blogging. Writing on Twitter, I think, is a better form of communication on the web; I'm a fan of parameters as a creative tool. So my real blogging has suffered. I'm trying to get back on the horse, though; I'm trying to generate thoughts that take longer than three lines to express. It is, of course, a thankless struggle.
It's particularly hard to go about writing a fucking book when you're expressing thoughts succinctly, poetically, in tweets all day long. I have maybe a hundred stories that'll make up this book; I wish I was able to render them all as tweet-haikus.
So, writing this book, I'm stuck in all kinds of neurotic weirdness: how many words have I written? How many pages is that? Is this thing long enough? Am I gonna make this thing too fucking long because I'm convinced that's what real books are? If I turn in a succinct single-crosscountryplane-ride book will my benefactors be dismayed?
Also, I'm depressed, at a depth I haven't been depressed in a couple of years. I broke up with my girlfriend about six weeks ago, and about five weeks later, suddenly, it came rushing to the fore and smacked my brain around. I'm taking, like, two hour naps twice a day. I don't want to move from the couch, I go to bed early, wake up early, think, Why bother? Then go back to sleep.
Usually when I'm depressed, I'm among the walking wounded, I can go to meetings and run errands and do that kinda life stuff. But now, I'm pretty much immobilized. I think (I hope) I'll climb out of it by the time I go back on tour next month.
What a terrible note to end this blog on.
Bunnies. Bunnies and puppies. Also: flowers. And candy? See, isn't that better?
Posted by Mike on September 24, 2009 10:36 AM
