Sloth, Pretense, and the Yattering

About a year ago, I got an idea bug. Bunch of projects I wanted to do. I knew I had to write a book about my time on the street, washing windows and grabbing scrap ladders for dope, of the Strange Playground I made of Houston and Reno. John Bruni, Bizzaro author and Bubba to me, had made mention of wishing someone would make illustrated audiobooks of his tales, or a similar thing. Well, I can do that, I thought...and after all that thinking it was time to quit dope.

Six weeks of agony and eight weeks of neurosis later, I still hadn't even begun. My muse died. My heart died. Everything I'd built in dope died, which meant I died. My brain felt wired backwards. If an emotion sought life, I crushed it with a process called Neuro-Linguistic Programming. So what, who cares, love is unnecessary, emotional investment is death, whittle it down to one-word responses, and above all, show no emotion. Listen to no memories of the havoc, the destruction, and the vainglorious waste of time of mislived life. As cruelly cold as that sounds, I found myself able to write with a more clear head.

But my brain hated the work. My body became a bag of water. Everything I wrote was pure shit. Worse than trash, bland and thin, boneless paragraphs--jumbled descriptions and bad juxtapositions, fuck me. It was horrible. For a month, I didn't write a word. The next month, I wrote maybe twice a week. 8 months of that and I had half a book. There's no better way to discourage yourself than to work like you suck, especially when part of you knows you don't.

Give up? Piss. I sought aid. Bubba urged me to watch ROADRUNNER, the film about Anthony Bourdain. Hearing his tale of junk, restaurants, and being inspired by Burroughs resurrected my dead muse. His ethic--wake up and fucking write right away--got under my skin. I used to be like that. There was a time when...but that's not for now. He quit, became a chef, and then a writer. Good for him he quit years ahead of me, when he was around 30. But that doesn't matter. What matters was, I got to see that HE DID IT. It CAN be done. A recovering hard-core addict needs to see that. Most of them get the vista from Bible Folks, but that doesn't work for me. I took it from ROADRUNNER. It's a great film. If you haven't seen it, you should.

I almost doubled my word count over the next 6 weeks. During that time, I watched another film about that grand Paragon of Theater, Orson Welles. I loved it, but not until today did I understand what it did for me. A few weeks passed. I listened to one of Welles' old Mercury Radio broadcasts, an almost silly children's program on Abraham Lincoln. It was fun, but I ached when I thought, "I was going to do something like that." Then I remembered what I wanted to do with Bubba's stories. And fuck, wasn't I going to make videos for everyone? I thought I was Manly Hall for a minute, what happened to that idea? 

The audiobook thing isn't pie-in-the-sky, so I kicked myself and over six hours made the audio cut of "Holliday Steps Out". And it was good. And Bubba loved it. He gave me permission to put it on YouTube and make more, illustrate them, etc. I thought about the Welles film, and that I must not--under any circumstances or cost--spin the wheels of fretting and rage and sloth. I must try, and fucking go for it. When it became apparent to Bourdain that he was set to attain glory, he didn't piss off, he cracked it out every moronic on a hope, and won. Welles...shit-- that man gave absolutely zero fucks about fear, he'd hit the streets empty handed and broke and lie, saying he was a pro while he was a nobody, selling it so well he landed his own Theater, and from there Citizen Kane. 

I spent my younger years getting high and denying myself. That shit's gotta go. I don't know if I'll make money with any of this but I'm doing it anyway. Everything is done now strictly for the sake of the doing. That's the best way for me to produce, and thus aspire. And also because if I don't, a yattering twat is mentally born in my ego-nut. It begins to chew. It's like an etheric sick. I'm glad I watched those films, if I hadn't, it might have eaten through my brain before I figured the fucker out.