Thursday, 11 June 2009

• Introspective Navel-Gazing in Place of Actual Content

  My eldest son got his learner’s permit today, meaning that the roads in our immediate vicinity have been rendered unsafe for all vehicles, pedestrians, light poles, fruit carts, and small mammals.  The teenaged “brain”—particularly that teenaged “brain”—operating a motor vehicle capable of lethal speeds?  Oh, the horror…the raw, unspeakable horror…

   

  I’ll tell you this much:  he’s not driving my Buick.

   

  There are a number of topics weighing on my mind right now, each of which deserves a post of its own:  fanatical lone-wolf Rightists have, in just a couple weeks’ time, murdered a prominent abortion doctor and opened fire in the Holocaust Memorial Museum; I have come to the conclusion that despite spending thousands of dollars a year on insurance premiums, I can’t afford to have the knee surgery I require, a sad truth forming the crux of my now-irreversible disdain for the American insurance and health care industries; I’m dumping large quantities of my beloved comic book collection, an act which represents a long-overdue final step in my ongoing quest to unburden myself from decades of compulsive collecting…yes, there are many subjects on which I could (and possibly should) be writing, if for no other reason than my own catharsis-slash-edification.  And yet, I am unable to tackle these subjects.  See, I’m having a writer’s crisis.

   

  All writers periodically suffer from writer’s block, though I don’t necessarily believe such a phenomenon actually exists as we currently define it (as I’m so fond of pointing out, comics scribe Brian K. Vaughan once described the phrase “writer’s block” as a euphemism for “video games”).  What I’m suffering from is the classic writer’s crisis, and though you may never have heard it referred to by that name, you know the nature of the beast all too well.

   

  “I’m never going to be as good as Writers X, Y, and Z.”

   

  This comes as the direct result of my following a Tom Wolfe book with Hemingway… which, as it turns out, is a recipe for the ultimate inferiority complex for any writer with serious aspirations. 

   

  Being aware of the causes of one’s idiosyncrasies, yet remaining unable to shake said baggage, is an odd dichotomy with which to wrestle.  This dualistic existence—understanding a thing whilst unable to control that thing—manifests in some interesting forms of frustration.  The mind dwells on minutiae, obsessing over the stylistic tropes that riddle one’s work like termites corrupting the timbers of an ancient house.  Then, hungry for more over which to torture itself and forever fixated on the greener pastures of Anywhere-But-Here, the mind learns to despise even those venues in which the writer succeeds:  I occasionally find myself eyeing my Xanga blog with something bordering on resentment, plagued by the thought, “Every word I type for that stupid blog is energy wasted…energy that could’ve been spent writing something meaningful.”  Naturally, that opens the door to the Great Literary Debate, the root conundrum of which is, “What is meaningful, anyway?” 

   

  …at which point in time my internal narrative collapses under a ponderous mass of existentialist poppycock that I, in my infinite mercy, shall spare the reader from having to endure.

   

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