Sit at your Keyboard and Bleed

Hemmingway might have done this too much. In the end, it took him with it. Usually, when I do this, I can't ever show anybody. It's just too much. The human capacity to observe and think and process, and comment may be too strong for a social creature without serious constraint.

We murder each other a little bit every day. Now that you can have any gun you want no matter what condition your head is in, lots of people actually murder each other a little bit every day. Maybe they're just doing exactly what I do, but with another tool. Maybe if Hemmingway had used a gun instead of an Underwood Portable, he'd be alive today.

Sometimes there's a lot of drinking that goes along with this process. Sometimes writers use things a lot stronger. I completely understand this. My writing when I drink is usually really shit. Gigantic long sentences, not perfectly created, that is recoverable when I'm sober, but only if I break them into more digestible bits, but then when I discover what it is I was trying to say, I end up not wanting anyone to see it.

I feel bad for pappa. He knew his best work was already done, and he couldn't live with it. He tried living off mojitos, odd-toed cats, and the passion of Cuban women, but it wasn't enough. With his spark spent, he had nothing to live for.

I repressed my spark for what seemed like a hundred years. What it's gonna do now that it's out sometimes worries me. I try not to bleed onto my laptop. It runs down my arms, into my lap, and down my legs onto a puddle on the floor around my feet. It doesn't hurt. If anything, it feels like the relief that comes from lancing a boil. Life can be a festering boil, welling up alongside your normal organs and skin features. Everyone has them; we cover them with lace or scarves and pretend they don't exist while the bile and putrid dead blood build up inside them, ready to erupt at any moment.

I write at night to drain the puss and bile and dead blood from the boils of my life. Sometimes I let you see it if nobody you know has their name in it. I don't even write anything terrible about people, just how human they are, how they try not to be vulnerable, but they are because they don't have a choice, and the world beats them for it.

If I do this right, then maybe people will see themselves in it. Maybe not tonight because I'm rambling, but on nights when I do it well, nights when my muse has mercy on me, maybe I can write a bit of truth that helps someone hurt less.

I'm not Pappa. My ideas about being a man are very different from his, at least in public. In private, yeah, I'd like to get drunk and box somebody because I love them, just to see who's the stronger man. If I hit you as hard as I could in the face, what would happen? How would you look at me? It's not dangerous. Boxers hit each other in the face all the time, and nobody dies. It's a test. I hit you in the face. You hit me in the face. We continue till one of us doesn't want to do it anymore. Something about being human makes us want to do that. Isn't it odd?

This sense of doubt whenever I try to create is probably the justice of my life. I had it too easy as a kid. I didn't have some of the worries about daily life that a lot of people have, so now whenever I try to be what I really want to be, it terrifies me, like a ten-year-old trying to creep out to the end of the high dive board, so he can have the exhilaration of jumping off but doesn't have the balls to do it.

Sit down at the keyboard and bleed, but don't say anything horrible. It's harder than you know. Pappa took his own life because he couldn't write anymore. He ran out of words. God made me so that the words came out really slow and pretty mangled when I was a child. There's nothing worse than when a child thinks he must be stupid, like they say. It was a gif, though. I didn't have words then, but now I have too many. I'll never run out.

I know why Pappa did what he did. Don't you think I know? Words aren't what the think they are. Most things aren't. Memes are bits of ideas. They want to replicate themselves and spread. We don't have any choice. Sit at your keyboard and bleed, goddamnit.