Tag: Writing

Doldrums

Dear Teenage Dirtbag

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What advice would you give to your teenage self?

No matter what you think, there will always be some things that are out of your control. The sooner you accept this, the sooner you’ll stop being disappointed in people.

Notice how I typed, “the sooner you’ll stop being disappointed in people” rather than “the sooner people will stop disappointing you.” People aren’t actively disappointing you; you’re actively being disappointed in them. That’s something else you need to learn despite how cliche it sounds: the world (and its inhabitants) don’t revolve around you.

Writing poetry might be a hobby to you know, but you’ll go to college to perfect your skill. And you’ll never throw away those halfway-filled composition notebooks because you want to show yourself just how far you’ve come along. Not everything you write, however, will be worthwhile. And you will get discouraged a lot. But one Saturday night – or was it a Friday? – you will get on stage and share your work with strangers at a poet’s cafe. 

This will then lead you to start reading your work at a library, and you’ll get to know the people there. You will later get a job at this library. And while the job might not be the most beloved, you will build so many great memories at this job. Most of them will involve reading to children, and bringing stories to life through puppet shows.

I know you don’t care about most of this. There’s one question you’re dying to know. Yes, one day, you’ll come to realize that there are some girls who will actually find you attractive enough to have sex with you. And some of them will actually let you. However, when you least expect it, you will meet a pretty green-eyed girl who will be the love of your life. Unfortunately, you will meet her after you start a relationship with another green-eyed girl and it will be two years before the two of you start something. 

You’ll lose her, but gain something from the relationship. And I’m not just talking about your son. And it’s something I can’t exactly explain to you in this letter. It’s just something that you’ll have to experience for yourself.

Photo made on Canva. Those are actually high school photos of me. I’ve censored the faces of others in said photographs. And that background is an actual scan of a composition book I kept in high school. I censored the poem because y’all don’t need to see how awful it was.
Stream of Consciousness

Maybe Trapped Mostly Pensive

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Cities familiar and unfamiliar

The voices come and go as they please. Some nights, I can hear them whispering inside my head as I struggle to sleep. My thoughts are a million per minute. Images flash behind closed eyes. Houses are empty. Vacant living rooms, cobwebbed and forgotten. A city where dreams wither and die. Street addresses that only exist once a week, or at a certain time of month. Former junkies wanting to tell their side of the stories. Superhuman beings wanting a chance to shine. An empty house. An empty room. An empty mind.

Some things I learned from someone who’s been to prison:

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Stream of Consciousness

An Atheist Christmas Special 2022

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He spends too much time watching TV. Staring at the screen of his cell phone. Sometimes, he does both at the same time. Wasting hours that he’ll never get back watching media he won’t remember the next day. 

Remember that one TikTok video you watched while taking a shit? You sat there for at least five videos before you wiped and got back to whatever you were doing before nature called. Five videos worth of time after your final push. You sat on that toilet for five more videos breathing in shit particles exhumed from your shitty ass. And you saw that one video—not a thirst trap, but you do tend to like those as soon as they start—and it made you laugh? 

Of course, you don’t. Nobody remembers what they watched.

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Doldrums

Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell

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On the brink of death, you have a lot of time to think. You’re no longer working on the abstract sense of time that waking, living humans are accustomed to; you begin working on dream-time. The time where a single minute can span hours, even decades, of your life.

The writing bug has bitten me; you can tell by the amount of Iggy Pop music I’ve been consuming. And while this blog is on my mind, it hasn’t been in the forefront. Not for a while, anyway. Not since I left my job at the public library. Not since COVID forced us all inside. While I am writing a post for it, I don’t foresee it being published any time soon. My mind is running with ideas for the future, for my creative outlet. And I think the post I’m working out might be the first in a new outlet.

An old voice also visited me, which would explain the Iggy Pop. The above quote is from the story I’m writing. And I’m taking it from a different angle. A more Tim O’Brien angle. Mixing the story-truth and the happening-truth in order weave the tales I created post high school and during my college years. And rather telling it from the point of view of the character as it happened, but I will now tell it in my present voice.

So in the meanwhile, this blog will be filled with song lyrics, poetry breaks, and book reviews.

Personal

The Midnight Disease

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Photo by Min An from Pexels

The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write…

Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

Have you ever gone back to read something you wrote in the past? Something at least decade ago, when the world felt like it had more promise. This is something I do whenever I’m stuck, which these days feels like a constant for me. Blame it on the distraction, or blame it on my inability to focus on any one thing without my mind bouncing around walls of my cerebrum.

As a writer – and I use this phrase rather loosely these days – I’m not allowed to believe in writer’s block. They pretty much beat it out of you in college creative writing courses. And any other writer that I know tells me the same thing. I haven’t written a short story in some time. The last thing I wrote – aside from blog posts – was a revision of the gravediggers story, something I’ve been toying around since the Bush administration.

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