December 11th pt. III

“So you’ve given up on your attempts at creative short stories for… whatever this is?”

Well, my friend texted me to submit something to his zine and there’s definitely not going to be room for a fully fleshed out short story and this kind of naturally started coming out somehow. This is pretty much what I used to write like and I’m beginning to see how I was able to craft my sentences in a way I liked. It is a shame I can’t write the way I like while telling an actual, interesting story though. Anyway, I’ll probably send him the first thing I wrote, but because the pressure put a bit of a fire under my ass I am trying to use it to get as much creativity out as I can while I can by lying to myself that I am going to manage to write anything else I would like to submit (considering how much I don’t want to submit any of the other things I wrote so far.)

“Well, then I guess I’ll leave you to it then…”

I read once that Pharoahe Monch keeps rhymes for five years. I don’t have that patience and, so far, haven’t managed to keep what I’ve written organized in a way where I could find a particular sentence from five years ago. I’ve got about ten different Word documents with final between one and five times in the file name and maybe a few As at the start to put it at the top alphabetically and I have to look at the last edit date to figure out which is which and I can’t recall if the piece of writing was in the second to last edit or the last edit and I also don’t remember if I finished the zine or stopped just before finishing because I didn’t know what to do with it or scrapped the whole idea, but took about half of the content to create a different zine. It’ll probably save me some embarrassment when I die.

I fluctuated between trying to kill my ego via honesty and killing myself via alcohol for several years. I never officially gave up, but it’s disheartening not to fail for so long. All I have are my habits and, ironically, they’re the reason that they’re all I have. Would it really make any sense to just ship on the belief there’s a better boat, but it won’t arrive until it needs to rescue me from drowning?

What a feeling to feel nothing but shame in a world so shameless. I think I once wrote that being self-loathing and self-absorbed are synonyms. I don’t remember if I ever said that to anyone.