The daily routine of (worst)writing is fairly easy to explain. And I know so many (worst)readers are just dying to read/hear this. First, I usually try to get up before 8am every morning. The only issues I have to deal with at that hour are my girlfriend who supports me by usually getting up earlier so she can prepare for her compulsive-career day. Sometimes I try to help her by making her laugh but she’s not a morning person – so more than not she’s just trying to avoid me.
Then there’s the issue of whether or not I have a beer or a wine hangover from the late night before where I compulsively fail (or is it actually succeed in this astute double negative case?) at (worst)writing.
Luckily I: I stopped drinking the hard booz about ten years ago – in my mid-thirties – along with smoking and other coincidental promiscuous behavior in the various red-light areas of west German towns.
I fill myself with coffee in the morning and then begin to (worst)write. Sometimes this goes on till about 2pm. Other times it goes to 8:30am. Either way, after it’s over I spend the rest of the day waiting for a green light to shine in my head that says: yeah, you’re a great loser in a world of so many winners and now it’s late enough to open that bottle of wine.
Luckily II: the morning hangovers aren’t that bad as I’m trying to cut back. But when you’re unemployable in a pseudo-socialist, job-institutionalized country like Germany and all you do is (worst)write unpublishable stuff… – jobs in Germany are distributed and are not earned; if USA is a country of some opportunity, Germany is a country of zero opportunity. All I can do at my age is continue on this path – which has been obviously chosen for me…
Of course, most (real)writers worth a hoot usually figure out that in order to produce what their heart desires they have to maintain a certain level of sobriety. I fashionably disagree. It is the lack of sobriety that gets me through all the hypocrisy – both of the situation of this life that I perceive and the reality that I avoid. If anything can be said of the things I’ve written in this silly blog one of them is not that my “complaints” are fiction.
Oh, how reality wishes to be my Desdemona and perception my Bukowski.
Like most things, I’ve recognized all my errors in life waaaay to late. This coincides with one other dramatic problem I have to face. Even though I’m well aware of my own mediocrity, I cannot give up the impulse to (worst)write. In order to maintain some sanity and not drink my liver to a stupor within the next few years, the only thing that keeps me going is the fact that I cannot (worst)write. So I sit down every morn and try not to (worst)write. I sit and stare out at the trees. I feel the wind hit the side of the building that houses the place I live. I smell the potential of fermentation in the trash can of my kitchen that serves as yet another example of my procrastination to not do what shouldn’t be doing in the first place.
My newest work/novel, which I started almost a year ago has the working title of Gloria’s Device. (I plan to title the German version Gloria’s Gerät). I have been desperately struggling with this work every morn for way too long. The sad part is, if I could only focus, if I could find again the magical combination of peace AND time, if I could only regain the confidence I had as a young man – a confidence that has obviously and deservedly been stolen from me via the crude entrails of matrimony – then maybe I could finish it.
But then again, I keep thinking of the moments in space & time that I spend in bookstores looking through the thousands upon thousands of badly written books and know that I can’t even meet that criteria.
Below an example of some of the stuff that has been re-written and written again for Gloria. I think I’ve re-typed this page a dozen times over the past three morns. This is the second or third re-typed page – I’m up to about six as I write this. I think.
No matter. In a world of waste, nothing matters, right?
If at all possible, young people and have-nots of the world heed this advice. The grass is not greener anywhere – except, maybe, at the far reaches of the universe. If you have any feelings for the people that brought you into this mess then never leave them, no matter what they try to say or convince you to do. Remain their burden just to remind them of their error(s) and live with what you were born to know and do: cut the grass and take out the trash and know love through the skin of your body only; don’t have children because you will continue the misery; be overly joyous and submissive to the fact that you can so easily mail-order things like
iPodsto yourself.
Rant and Loss.
-tgs-
February 28, 2008 at 4:32 pm |
Tommi – maybe it’s a blessing that your writing doesn’t make the criteria by which are judged the “stinker” published books, which are far too numerous in my opinion and a dreadful waste of good pulp.
Amen, takes a long gulp of the pre yard-arm glass of wine, in solidarity. Bless you! G
March 1, 2008 at 7:42 pm |
I sent you an e-mail (very short).
March 26, 2008 at 4:01 pm |
Moin Tommi — Nice to find a fellow expat writer in Germany, not-so-nice you have so much to moan about. It is hard for an expat to get work, but then, what kind would you want to do? Surely not cutting hair or delivering mail on a bicycle for Pin? I live in Essen, btw (please no Ruhrpott jokes), came 8 years ago from Chicago. I’m a journalist, so I do all right; nonfiction from home pays better than sitting on on the Kasse at Aldi, that’s for sure. I’m working on fiction as well, but then, everybody and their cat writes these days.
Buck up. ;.)
Tchüss! — Anika