All The Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues

My friends started blogs, and now so have I. Ah, the inaugural post...what to say...? I'm up at an ungodly hour, that's for sure. Been writing. That's what I (try to) do, write. Why? No one's put it better than my good friend Chris over at *his* blog, http://suburbanbackalley.blogspot.com/. He says:

" ...We write because we WANT to. There's something inside us, an urge or addiction that can't be stopped...what [do I] write about[?]... 'Whatever I want.' When I've gone too long without writing, I become depressed and rather bad-tempered...[But] then there's the cathartic sigh that comes with the start of a new project. Maybe it's unhealthy, but I don't care. This is what we do."

This is what we do, indeed. It's inextricable, people! Get used to it!

About 85% of my writing happens at night. Late at night. I tell myself it's okay because early writers of the movement towards Romanticism wrote mostly at night as well, so that must mean I'm on some kind of track--right or wrong track remains to be seen. Although if you call Jane Austen (Pride & Prejudice), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter), and Herman Melville (Mowby Dick) wrong, well...fuck you, *you're* wrong! But I digress, I'm nowhere near as good as those guys, though it isn't from lack of trying :/

But these writing vigils! (you exclaim in your best Jewish Grandma imitation), they're so excessive my little dreidel! Your bubbe worries. It's four in the morning don't you have anywhere to GO? Anywhere to BE? Where's your chuzpah gone? Well lucky you, I've got another good friend with a good blog to supply an answer. Take it away Bahn! http://blueman-in-a-redstate.blogspot.com/ :

"I developed some great friendships with an amazing group of people...[but] the bitter truth of my life...became more apparent. Everyone would no longer be in town..[and] sad as it is, my friends were the only thing lifting me up. If they were going to be gone and I had to live everyday without some sort of distraction from knowing that I'm literally going nowhere, I don't think I could've handled it. So there needed to be a change..."

My distraction is this. Writing. It's like what viagra must feel like for people with*out* E.D.! It helps distract me from "The Questions"....yoooou know the ones I mean. The ones that start small, then grow and grow beyond your control.

Maybe I'm not at the right school, not in the right majors, not in the right phase of life, not doing the thing I really want! Is everyone else as alive as I feel? Does every other person in the world have a "real" self like I do? If everyone DOES, then aren't there six billion vices on this planet clamoring that they are unique, when in fact we are all drowning in a sea of irrelevance? If that's NOT true, then that means the world is populated by machines, all lacking this "inside" feeling only I seem to have...(see! "The Questions"! They grow non-stop! they don't give a fuck!)

These questions, man...they boil quietly like water for tea beneath the surface of my day-to-day. And as soon as I close the bedroom door, slip on ma' PJ's, and shut the light off...SSSSSOOOEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

"Tea's ready! How will you take that?"

"Oh, with some frantic reawakening, rebooting of the trusty old MacBook, a swig of water for mental clarity, and the clickity-clackety-click of the keyboard 'til I pass out on it from exhaustion or writer's block...whichever comes first."

"Would you like some honey with all that?"

"If you can spare it..."

"Ooo, sorry, *just* ran out."

"Figures."

All this to say, I can't afford therapy so I write shit out and try to make sense of life from it all. And what a life it is.
It's got a little of this--> :D
and a little of this--> :(
A lot of unresloved this (but I'm workin' on it)--> >:(
Some of that--> o__0
And a healthy dose of that--> :/

And once in a while, when the stars align with my mind, and the writing goes well enough that it stops being shit and starts being its own thing. It's own real, big thing I can figure out and be happy with...
I can have a little of this--> :)

SO! We know why Chris writes, we know why Bahn writes, we'll know why my other friend (I know, I'm popular) Christian writes once his website is up...But why do *I* write? In my own words this time:

Writing helps me to understand one of the biggest reasons a person can be unhappy. The reason why people are selfish, close-minded, cruel. Why there is hate, and war, famine, and all the rest. It is our failure to grasp the real, raw, scary truth: other people are just as real as you. And only in a story can you enter these diverse minds and show how we are all, at the core of us, equal.