Oct 1st 2017, Brooklyn

Help me out here, will you?

Why write?

I mean, why write? What I write I want to read. What I want to read I want to experience in some form and what I don’t experience leaves me screaming for it self-pityingly. Admonitions of “but you can’t have it all” or “fucking nonsense, grow up” make me want all of them more.

However I twist it, writers and readers, of a certain breed, are an irrevocably wrecked and unsatisfied lot. Damaged and wanton and needy and flighty. If they are not some of these and more, they simply write. But are no writer.

They wake up in the middle of the night screeching in pain and fumbling for a book, a story, a word, a canvas… just like how anyone else would thud out of bed on finding a nest of crawling scorpions inside their blanket. It is poison I tell you. Venom.

But it is their poison. Our poison. Take that cocktail of poison away and you take away life support. Miserable beings, miserable. They have all that resentment and rage and insecurity and passion and doubt sloshing in their guts that they periodically ooze and spit out so that they can be sane for that much longer, before the next wave of verbal nausea.

That is why I hate those who write and are apologetic about it. Or are distanced from their work. Then why write? Really? You’ll deliberately sharpen pencils to drive into your thighs if you don’t write about that holiday you took in the blue seas with white shores? Fucking credit card expense report that is. Or brag about that brand new whatever colored fashion accessory you flaunt? Go take pictures or buy mirrors or something.. don’t waste words. Don’t waste poison. There are better uses for it.

Just mix and pour it out… I can’t seem to want to structure what I write. It is letters pinging out and hitting the screen. Do I really want to add a SPACE? A COMMA? A break in thought? Sculpting words an innumerable number of times, coldly, as if what I wanted to say was being dispassionately calculated for maximum impact on somebody other than me. And how meaningless is writing for someone else? Get them to write their own shit. It is laughable that they take your poison and without drinking it in, or wanting to die in it, add coloring pigments and put it in a showcase.

That is not writing, that is typing.

That is transaction.

I see merchants pass themselves off as writers. PIGSHIT.  Nothing but soulless writing for vacuous reading for use-and-throw rating. Fuck that ecosystem of words. Words and writing should be an Amazonian wild forest, teeming with missteps and ugliness, and creepy crawlies as much as the majestic trees and canopies. What is abounding today is farm raised words. Words written by minds trained to embellish frivolity in flowery sentences with grinning headshots of an idiot with folded arms on the inside of the dust jacket. Sterilely opulent gardens of words by people who crave the fame of writing and not the thrill of letters or fanaticism of the ideas that birth them.

Shouldn’t good writing be an act of change? An act that wrenches heads violently to point them to overlooked vistas or a siren call to another way of life or a jellyfish tentacle connecting writhing ideas amongst maddeningly catatonic lives?

Suicide notes contain more poetry and integrity of feeling; Every piece of writing should be a mini suicide note; Unless, UNLESS, if not written at that point, would’ve lead to smashed heads in television sets or bachata-ing into incoming higway traffic.

Miserable beings. It is transitory though. And if you are smart, you have a collection of baubles to distract you from remembering that you have all that toxins, some sweet… oh, sweet as in SWEET, but toxic nevertheless, inside you. Filling and engorging your skin. But it is when you are alone that it all gets back and you need to relieve yourself from the words, the thoughts, the images, the stories, the wails before picking up the grocery bags with a heave of relief or turning on the dishwasher with shaking hands.

And readers are just aspirational writers. If as a reader, you haven’t at some point discussed, cogitated, or written, or badly wanted to write something, stop wasting your money on words. You are just feeding into the sewage that is flooding the scene. I feel the same way about myself in many aspects of life. But it is an honest assessment to admit that sometimes we contribute to the decay in aesthetics and sensibilities of art forms. Not that bad writing cannot be indulged in. The words are just words. But the authors and their bandwagon of inconsiderate readers are wearisome. Go be a vlogger. Go RJ. Critically analyze Bollywood movies. Or better still become a manager. Manage that project into outer space.

Reading and writing, that self-congratulatory, self-contradicting poison that empowers and disempowers, that weakens and trivializes knowledge and goodness will exist. I can’t seem to make up my mind whether to love or loathe it. Much like I am ambivalent in my hate towards those who create and consume it.