stuck stuck stuck
Being blocked, as a writer, is an isolating experience. And since life is already (too) full of isolating experiences (many by design because we let the sociopaths run things), being blocked is like a compounded bad thing. Nothing flows. Nothing works. Every sentence is stupid. Every lede is a cliché. It's constipation without an OTC remedy.
And yet if you don't keep picking at it, pushing at it, trying different ways to find a way in, you end up with nothing instead of something bad. So you go. You pick, you push, you search. You look for a crack, a crease, a seam, a crevasse.
Sometimes it's easy. Sometimes you have a song on and some lyric reminds you of some other lyric that reminds you of some poem that has a line that works here and now. Other times it's not easy. You doubt your whole life. You don't think you have anything worthwhile to give. You yearn to quit, to go peaceable-like.
You wonder if everyone who has feted you over the years was doing so as a joke, a bit. You picture a room full of them. Everyone is dressed nicely and the lighting is soft, gentle, kind. All the people are talking about all the times they thought you were a loser who sucked at words. They are comparing notes.
Remember that time, the actor would say, he told us about that idea for a one-act play near the beer tent in Parc des Amériques during the Fringe Festival? Yeah, that one. He thought it was so clever. Man, I didn't have the heart to tell him it was derivative and stupid. I'm really glad he didn't write that one. Could you imagine having to tell him no?
That's nothing, says the poet from Chicago. In undergrad we used to email poems back and forth and I always had to work hard to find something nice to say. I would have been honest but I knew he couldn't take it. It would have wrecked him. I didn't have the heart. He had the affectations but none of the gifts. He wanted to be the thing so badly that he didn't figure out why.
There's more, and it gets more brutal. And the more brutal it gets, the louder they laugh. It sharpens to a point. The music swells. The lights go nuclear and then there's only darkness and quiet. These people existed, yes, but not really. They are 2D characters at best, but even in their thinness they still cut, still draw blood, still remind me that I am afraid sometimes and that fear feels like failure.
And yet look.
A crack. A crease. A seam. A crevasse.
brb
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