the grinding of the wheel goes on

Brutal. Spent some time writing and doing edits on some of my chapters today and it's been tough going trying to find my voice. I see glimmers and sparkles of brilliance littered among boring old generic prose and I can't help but feel like my stories are a bit like a panhandler working a stream, sifting out the sand from the gold. I don't want my reader to have to do that. I want the reader to get caught up in a story that is consistent in tone and keeps them engaged, not having to work through the trash in order to get at something worthwhile, it should all be worth their while.

All of it.

But I'm stuck, going from second-person, to third to first and wondering which approach favors me (and my audience) most, and now I'm realizing that I have to take the first-person. My strengths are so obviously in first-person that I don't know why I am banging my head trying to write any different. And I realize that it's because of the audience that is making me so unsure of myself. It's not really personal when I'm writing to solicit attention. It's personal when I am writing to myself.

Then again.. it's the audience that matters more. Isn't it? I guess if art is subjective, it has to come from a place of meaning but at the same time, prepared for public consumption. I think of men like Henry Darger who achieved fame as the face of the Outsider art movement. He wrote a 15 thousand plus epic, along with dozens of paintings and have not shown or even attempted to sell any of what he's produced. It wasn't until he died when his small apartment was cleaned out, that anybody laid eyes on his work. Darger didn't write or paint for money, he did it for himself. He lived a humble existence, rooted in a fantasy of his own and he knew better than to capitalize on it.

Maybe he was embarrassed about it, I don't know, but I do know that people found it fascinating. Would they have been equally as interested had he formally presented his book and artwork? I don't know, and it's possible that Darger himself felt unsure of what he was doing. But he did it anyways, because he had to.

He wanted to. Other people be damned.

This dilemma has been a pervasive one for most of my life, where I have to choose between my own voice and the voice I use when I speak to an audience. Should I die tomorrow, maybe someone will come across this blog, my stories and will see a new me to appreciate more than the me I already am. I don't know. All I know is that I want to do good by what I do. Yet I still have trouble coming to terms with the idea of having a marketable product, because while I do have to eat, I don't want to see my work as being anything less than heartfelt. It's so hard to strike the right balance.

Anyways, I wish I could write a book that would be well-received in THIS voice. The one I am using right now. I like how I write these blog posts, where I am honest and forthcoming and not too worried about any adverbs, descriptive paragraphs, subjects, nouns, verbs, grammar mistakes.. It's so easy and effortless and it brings me a welcome relief from the rigors of having to write well enough to impress. I don't want to impress, and I know I don't have the technical ability enough to do it either, but I do want to share my thoughts and get paid for them...  It's such a mess going through what my head and heart has left for me to clean up. I guess I do want to impress people after all, but how? And how do I do it honestly without resorting to dance around for their amusement?

I don't know. I am such a contradiction. I love myself and hate myself equally at all times. I can't seem to draw forth the man I want to be and present to the world without some ugliness cropping up from inside. Maybe the ugliness is endearing in it's own way, but I am ashamed of it. I don't like feeling vulnerable whenever I pour my emotions out and yet, I need to take responsibility for them, which is not something I'm comfortable doing given how I seem to be in an endless tug of war with myself.

Well. Suck it up I guess. There is no other alternative but to keep hope alive.

Otherwise there's nothing left.

fly me to the moon

One thing I realized a few days ago that has persistently stuck inside of my noggin, is the knowing expectation of society for individual's to contribute. For some reason, I had come about to the knowledge that each of us absolutely has to produce something of value by our efforts in exchange for the right to survive. Whether it's working a hot dog stand, or writing a book, we are rewarded for our efforts and it is not an option to refuse this obligation of us. We are born into these expectations, of adding continual value to our environment and this realization really struck a chord with me.

Sure it seems obvious, common sense even, but I have never looked at a job in quite this way before. I have always thought that I was showing up at a certain time to perform certain tasks and off I went, without a look back. But now I realize that it doesn't have to be this way. I can offer the world value in terms of my thoughts. My ideas and writings each has potential in adding value to the world. I need to believe this more fully, knowing how much I loathe my job. I need to know that there are alternatives out there to how I make money, and writing is but one way of many.

But I have to write. I need to get better at it. Type, type type until these words coalesce into something I can market and sell. At the same time I think about the potential of earning a living from writing, I can't also but help think about how disingenuous it somewhat is. I don't like the idea of churning out a "product" where I share my innermost thoughts and feelings. I don't like the idea of charging people admission to my heart when I have it wide open, ready to receive whoever is interested in looking inside. I like sharing myself freely, I don't feel comfortable charging for it, but at the same time, this is really how the world works. You create something, you sell it. You hustle and connive and market and convince and conform, and cater to the demographic that you aim for and hope you get a reward.

Such monkey talk. I'd feel little satisfaction in having to press a lever to get a banana tumbling down the chute into my hands. I would rather... I don't know. I'd rather write for approval and appreciation. To know that my words were enjoyed, useful and contributed value to the reader rather than take advantage of them, leaving them to feel manipulated.

I don't know.. I guess I'm over thinking this sort of thing. On one hand, I know I have to write FOR an audience and not for myself as I do with these blog posts. But I would rather write for myself and let the audience determine itself. I don't like the idea of targeting a specific group of people, but rather ALL people who are interested are welcome to receive my words.

Ironic of me to write all this, being that this blog is completely private and unavailable for the public to look at. But I do have secrets that only I should keep within myself, and it is somewhat cathartic to let fly a burst of emotional energy through my writing.

That realization also, makes writing a novel tough. It's too structured. Too contingent on delivering a product of mass-appeal. It's too constrictive, too niche, too mainstream... I don't feel comfortable dealing with the dilemma of writing for fun, or for profit and I am trying to do my best to marry the two concepts together. To write for FUN and MONEY is what I am presently trying to aspire towards. I need to feel spurred on as I work on something structured, rather than feeling like a slave to it. I don't know if it's my lack of discipline in what I do, but I can't figure out my voice. My natural voice is in these blog posts, where I write without self-editting myself, where I freely let loose what needs release. I can't seem to find it in writing a novel.. I sort of have, but I don't know if that is the approach best suited to my needs.

It's a silly puzzle. Hopefully one day, I'll solve it.

regrets, I've had a few

Today I took it upon myself to write. I mean really, write. I had a copy of Stephen King's "On writing", Brenda Ueland's "So you want to write", my laptop, my tablet, my phone.

And I wrote a chapter. It was alright. Nothing amazing. But I was guilted into it by King's book who made me feel like if I wanted to write, I absolutely had to. Talking and thinking about writing only serves to prolong the frustration of not actually doing the deed, and I'm okay with that I guess.

But damn, after Jennifer blew off the pages I submitted to her over email a few days ago, I felt I really had to prove to myself that I could write something worthy of praise. Anything, and this sensation of wanting to prove her wrong carried over in my prose, which became a little more descriptive and flowery than usual.

Well, I think I made a dent but I don't think I've yet demolished the wall.

Looking over my blog last night after I posted, I couldn't help but see the same old me whining about the same old things for years on end. "I want to write. I want to love." and all the spiritual/religious talk of which I am still in fascination with to this day.

When will it ever end? When will my breakthrough happen?

I wrestled with the possibility earlier today thinking that I'm just not fit to be a writer. Even if I wrote a book, and I have, there is no guarantee of it being any good. And as I looked over what I had written in the past, I couldn't help but feel embarrassed about how inadequate it all seemed to me. Where was my centerpiece? My one chapter to show off to people? And I realized I didn't have this chapter, and that I've only myself to blame.

That is true. Only myself. If I want something badly enough, I need to push at it. I need to grit my teeth and buckle down and settle into the habit of pursuing a goal as doggedly as I can, no matter what is thrown at me. But I still get these doubts in my head. That I'm not any good. That it's a waste of time trying to pursue a career in this field and that my well of ideas is drying up.

I don't know what to think anymore. For so long I have held onto this dream of mine and I can't let it go, but it feels like I need to. I need to either surrender myself completely to what it is I want to do, or to give up on it altogether.

Writing this blog post, a small inner-voice squeaks out at me to keep going. To keep pushing on, but I can't help but feel like I'm an idiot for having once believed what I did. That I could make something out of myself, on my own steam and I find as the years pass, that the possibility of that happening is growing slimmer with each day.

A writer has to write. A football player has to play football. A musician needs to be playing his instrument, so why aren't I? Why is the goal more appealing to me to think about than the effort to get there? I mean I have to work at it. There is no other option, and a part of me feels like I've already gone over this before many times in my head and I realize that I am numbed to these self-criticisms. I am not spurred to write nearly as much as I would like and...

God damn it. Why bother? Why keep trying?

Those who keep trying, never fail. That's why.

I really want to believe that. I really need to believe that. If I can't write, if I have no talent to offer the world whatsoever, no meaningful commentary to share, then I am worthless. I have nothing. I may as well accept my place in line along with the mediocrity of the rest of us who work jobs that we dislike and indulge in trivialities, like getting drunk, so that we can forget about the dreams we have given up on.

I can't be that guy. But the temptation is still there. To surrender myself to fate and do only what comes effortlessly for me.

Thinking and dreaming.

Not writing.

Not anything else worth being practiced upon.

I am a dreamer caught in a nightmare of my own making.

And I hate it.

that which should not be said

Here we go. I've forgotten when was the last time I put up a new blog entry, but boy, am I way overdue for one.

In the past year, I have been stricken with a kind of intellectual disease, a religious fervor if you will, where I cannot help but consume all manner of religious and spiritual ideas to better realize the experiences I have had occur to me during this period. Everything from the Gnostic Gospels to Philip K Dick's thousand-plus page worth of mindfuckery entitled simply, "Exegesis".

I can't get enough. I can't stop reading. I can't stop watching documentaries on the subject either. It has consumed all interest that was once reserved for video games, flighty SF novels and films involving copious amounts of either gore, nudity or robots that shoot lasers from their eyes.

Because I am aware that this is the internet, I am reluctant to discuss the original impetus for this newfound motivation of mine to better understand my place in the cosmos. Not because I am afraid that someone will read this, but because I have reason to believe that there is something important going on with myself that needs to be kept private until I can first make sense of it. The internet never forgets, and while I do have the option of deleting past entries, I also need to be cautious in regard to data now being mined by the NSA and whoever makes up the Canadian counterpart of an intelligence-gathering organization. Should something ever happen, these words may come back to haunt me if there does indeed exist a database which has profiled me and added this blog to their repository. One can never be too cautious these days, and while common sense tells me that writing offline is what I should be doing, I cannot help but think that there is value in posting this on the internet. For some reason or another, I feel among my paranoia, a sense of duty and blogging these thoughts assist in realizing this. Don't ask me how or why or when, but it would not surprise me should at some point in the future, these words will be examined. Whether that will be to my benefit, or to my detriment, I can only wait and see.

It seems in 2009, a change occurred in me. I had experienced what is known as samadi. A Hindu concept of spiritual awakening where the subject becomes the object (at one with), and the ego gets pushed aside in receipt of a force that, in my opinion, could be considered as spiritual possession where your sense of autonomous direction gets pushed aside in favor of instinctual, or guided processes that appear to result in the appearance of coincidences resolving themselves within a larger framework. Or a higher purpose, if you should subscribe to the notion of pre-destination. It felt as if I was placed on a path that guided me towards greater understandings and richness of meaning, and throughout, I felt as if I were nothing but an observer to this guidance taking place.

In reading William James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience" I have come to skimming through much of the anecdotal of what is described, and instead delving into the meat and potatoes of James's conclusions on the subject. He puts forth criteria that is common among those having experienced a spiritual awakening, and I was none too surprised to find that I have met his definition of it down to each bulletpoint he has listed in this book. Now that I have affirmed the legitimacy of my experiences, I can only take it to the next step and ask myself, why? Why have I experienced what I did? While I am convinced I know of the reasons (according to what James postulates), I am not convinced of the external cause, namely God or some superior intelligence intervening on my behalf so that I could realize some form of divine wisdom which previously had been withheld to me.

I suppose the correct approach is to accept that it just happens. When one hungers enough for truth, it is shown and my bafflement is a result of asking for too much, all at once, where I cannot process it in the way I would like to. The human mind cannot contain the vastness of the universe. To know all that has ever been written, acted, or said. It is an impossibility for an individual to fully hold all that is worth knowing, within the limited properties of his mammalian brain.

Yet, it feels like I have realized truth. That I understand it, and that I have a duty expected of me to honor it. But I what I concern myself with now, is realizing how best to disseminate what I have learned in a format that is easy to read and understand.

So that leads into the book I have written. At the time, while in possesion of this "spirit" and being given heightened faculties and greater depth of perception; I had erroneously assumed the very best of what it was that I was writing, and to become convinced that these words were of extreme importance and had best be handled in as inconspicuous a manner as possible. I honestly felt that what I had written, would blow everything apart at the seams and that the reader would no longer be the same once my words pass into their eyes and into their minds.

Boy, was I ever a schmuck.

In reading what I have written, I cannot help but be both proud, and embarrassed at the quality of what I managed to exhibit. In all these years of craving to become a writer, I had at the completion of my manuscript, felt that this, at the time, was the very best of what I could do. That it had achieved what I originally aspired towards for the particular theme and structure of the story. A review of it, yielded holes and choppy transition. Lots of needless exposition and generally, a poor organization and understanding of the structure a good novel needs in order to become appealing to to the intelligence and imagination of both the reader, and the author. At the time, I was somewhat aware that this book wasn't perfect. I knew I could always go back and fix it up, smooth the rough parts over and that slowly, but surely it will come to as perfect as I could make it.

It has not. Six months later, it has its good and bad and I am at a loss for further inspiration enough to bring it up to the standards I would like to see it at. I am my harshest critic, and it pains me to think that I was able to suspend all sense of reason and taste on the basis that I was in "tune" with a higher power of some kind.

Perhaps I was. But it is this doubt that confounds me. Why is it that I accept the validity of my experiences, but not the result of these convictions? Shouldn't an enlightened person be able to write well? Shouldn't the book be immediately worth publishing being that I wrote it in such a heightened state of mind? What exactly was I experiencing, if not communion with the holy spirit? Or some spirit?

That is what troubles me at the moment, to accept the notion that while I did have something extraordinary happen, I cannot for the life of me understand why it was that the book turned out the way it did. It calls into question the possibility that I was not in communion with anything outside myself, but myself. Then should I accept that possibility, I had to try and understand the why of it. Why has my senses sharpened themselves? Why did I feel so grossly inflated in terms of perceptual acuity and if this was me responsible, how can I come to terms with it? How can I ever believe in spirituality, if I deluded myself somehow and that these experiences were not a result of some holy visitation, but a part of my mind that decided to flip some rarely-used switches and transformed how I perceived everything? How can I rationalize the irrational?

I suppose that is where I am at the moment. I truly believe that everything has a reason, and there is purpose in the minuscule and mystical ways of being. My faith pulls me one way, and my reason, another in this endless game of tug of war that I am caught up in playing. There is no resolution to be had and the struggle, the journey will always exist between truth and deception. There can be no confirmation of one side or another, save for what one's intuition accepts, and even that is a wild notion in of itself. To surrender oneself to intuitive understandings, is to risk loss of reason and rational behaviour. There must be a balance that I am comfortable enough to live my life with, and I am in the most uncomfortable place at the moment.

Throughout all my questions and doubts, I can only hold a few ideas sacred. Principles that can never be violated, and one of them involves that there is a God in the universe. A creator, and that it is my responsibility to be able to discover how it is that I relate to this being, and what role is expected of me. That, to me is inarguable. There is no doubt in my mind, that there is a greater intelligence out there that has created all of what we see and know. But what is my relation to it? What is my duty to it? And should I realize answers to these questions, what is my reward for placing trust in such a deity? Should I not expect a reward for surrendering my will to it? Because I truly felt as if I have, and the results were not as satisfactory as I would have liked them to be.

So then, what is the point? If all the faith I can muster, all the courage and strength in the world results in my living an unhappy, loveless life working at a job that I hate, then what good is having faith? Why should I persist in cultivating it? Why do I continue to keep trying, knowing that at some point, my efforts will be in vain?

No matter how hard I try, faith doesn't seem to make any difference other than to pull me further into doubt, into more questions that I feel apprehensive about finding answers for; and the ridiculous part of it all, is the idea that I still believe. I still believe, no matter what happens to me, I still believe that there is a God out there and that I am in his good graces somehow. Somehow.

Maybe I am only seeing the forest for the trees and that inevitably at some point in my life, my sufferings will be looked on as having been necessary for what it is that I want most out of this world.

Love. Just to love and be loved. Who the hell would say no to that request? Why would God? Why would I? And it seems that the more I struggle towards those two things, the more elusive they become, the more frustrated I get and the more hopeless I feel. Then I hit bottom, and I somehow pull myself out of the abyss using nothing other than faith, which is almost annoying in it's tenacity to latch on; and I go back to repeating the same patterns that I have been all my life.

The worst part of all this, is the awareness. The knowing. The shame and liberation that awareness brings has been of little service to me when at this stage in my life, I should have long realized the mistakes I have been making which has kept me from getting what I want.

What I need. And I am reminded of Buddhism, that all life is suffering and while I cannot help but agree and yet, I still believe it is possible to forge a better me out of these fires I have burned myself in. That against all odds, everything will be okay. Even if much of my life has proven little in the way of an evolving of perspective that directly benefits and improves my worth as a human being.

It's all such a fucking tangled ball of yarn.

Who else but me can fix it?

Who else but me.

Right?