Hey, sorry. I'm a bit out of tune. Anyway I was reading over this post that I had in drafts and it struck a chord in so many ways. First off, I'm still struggling with all this shit. Which is sad. I mean a year fucking later, really? And not like I haven't done this before at several points in life.
You know what that makes me? Days of Our Lives. Back in high school, I was fucking hooked on that show. My mom used to take late lunches to pick me up from school and when we got home she would watch it. At first I was like, soaps, fuck that. But then after awhile it just got in my brain and I was all like OMG Sammy is such a bitch when are John and Marlena just going to get back together Jack is hard-core and can't wait for him to take down Peter etc.
Freshman year of college we did not have cable TV in the dorms. Despite the fact that ETP and I bought an antenna that employed secret government technology the reception we got was shit. I recorded Days every day, however (on VHS; Jesus L. Christ I am fucking old now), and would watch it after classes. But the combo of truly awful reception and recording on century old technology finally got to me. Having to watch that shit through so much snow was rehab for me. I was off the drug.
Several years later, ETP and I took in an episode of Days on a whim. And you know what? Everything was exactly the fucking same. Sammy was still a scheming bitch, Bo and Hope were still having problems, so on and so forth. In the intervening several years we missed precisely nothing. Now, if you watch soaps, sorry, your stories, you know this concept to be true. You know that you can drop a show at any given point in time and find an arbitrary point in the future and start watching again and you know precisely what is going on. Seeing this in action though, knowing it from experience instead of merely just knowing it, is astounding.
So anyway, that's me. A year ago I was full of self-doubt. Afraid that what little talent I ever had, if any, was gone or at least severely diminished. But thinking maybe, just maybe, something's still there, and it can be resurrected one more time than Jesus was. A year ago I was stuck on this girl who is truly amazing on paper but maybe not so much in real life but maybe still is for real and so I'm still like come on this could work if the world would just stop being stupid but it's really me who's stupid. And a year later... Le sigh.
You can see that since I've been gone I've totally 'roided out my run-on sentence skills.
I'm a good writer. I enjoy writing. And my shit's funny. But what if it isn't? See there's that crap again. I really need to get back to just writing for the love of writing. Doing it for my own benefit. Who cares if people aren't on board? It's not for them. It's possible I could actually get my shit together.
The reason why I decided to put this post out there, including the old one, ultimately, was because I was going through all this pathetic self-doubt a year ago, saying I'm not funny anymore, blah blah. But then I read some of the stuff I wrote and I was like, dude, that was pretty funny. So if I was thinking that shit back then and was still able to mine some nuggets without realizing it, hey, why not now?
It's sad that I feel the need to clarify but I do: I am completely sober right now. Totally high on life, rah rah and shit. Well not really; I used to get high on life but I built up a tolerance (what is that from? LATER EDIT: It's from the awesome but sadly defunct webcomic Antiwang).
Maybe I'll fail to gain any traction here but I hafta start someplace. So without further ado, here is my mopey-ass shit from a year ago/right now. It's unedited from where I left it, and incomplete. But if we're gonna pick up with Sammy being a bitch, let's look back to when she was also a bitch:
Dammit. Every time I think I'm gonna get back into the swing of things here, I just don't. Laziness is the main culprit but let's do what so many of us tend to do and pretend it's more complicated than that.
Life really changed for me in 8th grade. Prior to that I was just me. I was a dork and I went about my business and that was just that. I think in 8th grade I really became self-aware and maybe that's not such a great thing. Maybe Patrick Swayze was onto something. For the uninitiated, that man simply was not self-aware. If you feel that it is pretty bush to talk this way about the dead, fuck you. I think you should speak the same of someone in death as you did in life. We are such pussies when it comes to that.
Sorry, that was a rant I didn't intend to get off on. And oh did I ever get off. Anyway...
Ever since 8th grade, I have been constantly concerned that I am not as good as I used to be. I always have this feeling that I used to be pretty smart and clever and funny and I'm just not as much so anymore. I'm also always concerned that I'm not good enough at that point in time as well. Basically, I'm just one big inferiority complex.
With regards to this 'blog though, I occasionally read back through old posts, and I find some really, really funny shit. And yeah OK, sure it's funny to me -- I fucking wrote it. But I read stuff and I'm like, yeah, I'm just not that funny anymore. And that's just with the average post; forget about the handful of posts that even I have to admit are just sheer fucking genius. I just can't be funny like that anymore because I have gotten stupider.
I used to have no real justification for my declining abilities but now I can come up with some legit ones. I am on the wrong side of 30 now. Six months sure but hey, the wrong side is the wrong side. It's just fact that we start to go downhill at some point. I am also continually terrified that years of drinking way too much have destroyed enough brain cells that, yeah, I am definitely stupider. Doesn't stop me from drinking anymore though, but well, what do you expect? I'm stupid now. Even stupider than before.
I try to remind myself of days past when I thought I was in trouble and I was just manufacturing nonsense. I also try to think about what Jim Rome used to say about John Daly -- the immensely talented golfer who basically threw all his shit away 'cause he had drinking and gambling and various other personal problems: you never lose the talent.
That of course presumes I ever had any talent. I dunno if I had any talent, but I could make some people laugh. People who I'd never even met before. That was pretty neat. But laziness and apathy and just the kind of atrophy that comes with time kinda killed all that off.
The only way to get back, or, shit, get anywhere, is to just quit whining and work at it.
OK so this is about the eight billionth post that I have made like this over the past year or so. In case if you're wondering, dude, where the fuck are those eight billion posts, well, most of them I wrote and never published. Or, I released them into the wild and then I pulled them not long thereafter. I may have already mentioned this but I am posting so infrequently these days that I can't remember what I did and didn't actually publish and leave out there.
Maybe one of these days I'll publish a compendium of all those phantom posts so that we can all see what my mental state has been like the past year. In case you are saying, um, no thanks, BLM, settle down. Just consider the following:
- I haven't killed anyone else.
- I haven't killed anyone else.
Well pretty bad, really. Trite is the best word to describe it, 'cause most of it was about a girl. I wouldn't say it's Stabbing Westward-worthy material, but it was pretty weak. I'm mostly over it that I'm not making the efforts that I was making before, but I haven't totally let it go yet either. Gotta find some new stupid bullshit to focus on before that will happen.
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