The Breath of Death

Sometimes I wonder if I died a while ago and just didn't realize it.

Things that would have once sent me a'shivering, songs, for instance, or seeing something so touching, now just aggravate a fuzzy space where my box of shivers once resided. It reminds me of something I read in Stephen King's Bag of Bones, about death making someone crazy.

Ever since I read that book, I've meant to read The Moon and the Sixpence by W Somerset Maugham. I believe I have the text on my Kindle, or perhaps my Nook, which I cleverly called Nookworm. I amuse myself without reason sometimes.

The rain has had me itching to write. Just sit down somewhere with a pack of cigarettes, a pot of coffee, and a bottle of whiskey and just write until my fingers go blue. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, my children keep me this side of complete madness, for which I am grateful, but when I'm not with them, when I'm driving or sitting at my desk in my cubicle at my job, I can imagine, perhaps too clearly, going insane with words and music and all my vices.

My e-mail is full of messages from writing websites of all sorts, with how-tos on beginnings, middles, endings, contacting agents, convincing publishers that I'm the one, descriptives, character analysis, building to a climax, etc. etc., but they don't tell me how to get past this reality and lose myself in whatever I want to create.

I feel most of us are the same...being broken down one dashed dream at a time, one disappointment, one heartbreak, one loss, one memory at a time, until the children we once were who believed in, hoped for and whispered magic are naught but ghosts pretending to still breathe, walking through our day-ins and repeats until we can just figure out how to get to the other side. My belly burns with indigestion or perhaps even an ulcer, but even that is muted, tickles the bridge of my nose and makes me want to cry, but I don't, because I can't feel anything anymore. Only my children bring me back to life, to reality.

I fear this for them.

Gnawing Ache of Desire

Hypergraphia.
Graphomania.
Scribomania.

All those are taken, so I thought I'd be clever and do psychoscribbles, you know, like psycho-babble? But no, some person who was clever before I came along already took that.

I also considered ScribbleScratchScrawl, but...I thought about how I'd feel regarding the author of that particular blog for making me type all that in the url window. Somewhere along the lines of disdain.

I'd like to tell you that I'm currently sitting at my own desk, an expansive oak with lots of drawers (full of neatly stacked packages of college-rule paper, blank notebooks, self-made chapbooks, and other writerly treasures), covered in all my old journals, cups of pens (particularly the ones that flow smoothest on paper), pencils, markers, highlighters, and sharpies, a cup of coffee in my hand when I pause from writing this, and a beautiful, majestic view of a gray-brown, weathered dock leading out into koolaid blue water, which I will walk at sundown and just....inhale the inspiration of life and listen to the muses whisper in the wind.

I am sorry to disappoint you, fair subjects, but I am typing this on my 15-minute break at my desk with a financial institution. I have, however, ingested copious amounts of coffee this drizzly morning.

As I'm writing this, I am inwardly complaining to myself and the universe and my God and your God and your gods and your goddesses and the trees and the phone on my desk about not being able to write. They say to write without ceasing. Like a religion. "Pray without ceasing." Phillipians, something. I think. I probably have that wrong. But you get the gist, si?

Write like praying.

I try. Most days I try. A poem. A journal entry. I feel bulemic. Forcing puke out in lacy letters. Bitter is a truth. I can feel it undergoing alchemic transformations which will soon be anger, hatred. I fear this sludge work which I've done for so long it's probably a part of my DNA now. God forbid my children have inherited the customer service gene. I've done this for so long I've been brainwashed to believe I love it, it is a privilege. It is all-consuming, this massive part of my day that overshadows all else - my children, my family, my writing, my dreams.

When I leave, I usually don't feel like utilizing my brain for any sort of function, so I either watch cartoons with my children or some mind-numbing television show or play Cookie Jam.

Have you seen (or read) The Phantom Tollbooth? With the boy and the dog and they enter another world through a play tollbooth gifted to him. At one point, the boy passes through a part of the world with the dolldrums - they cease to do anything, just sit down and nearly wink out of existence.

That is what the aptly named web does that - it sucks you in, quickly, traps you in its sticky strings of trolls, games, apps, memes and cat videos. I am guilty. Perhaps doomed to watch life go by in clips on YouTube, and if you find that funny instead of tragic, if you laugh instead of choke up and realize we're all the same, then we've gone so far beyond failing we may as well be in that other world, laying down with the dolldrums, and forget existence.

And the evening and morning and the post were the first day.