Eccentric Flower:199812/verily i may scream

four twelve twenty

verily i may scream

I am useless.

I have been in front of a computer all day long and I haven't done one damned thing of merit. A little fiddling with tasks around the edges, a lot of email ... nothing that I can look back on today as a genuine accomplishment

Not that I didn't enjoy the email, if you were one of the people I replied to today ... but email doesn't count. It doesn't matter beans if I wrote Iain-Padraic 2500 words on the spur of the moment about Solomon and the Bible last night. I mean, it's nice for Iain-Padraic, but ... oh, hell, that makes it worse. That makes me sound unappreciative.

OK, look. I haven't written any fiction for nearly two weeks. I started a story based on a dream I'd had, last week, and Nonelvis made me realize I was going to have to rip it apart and start over, and it wasn't that great an idea in the first place. Then I got sick. I have been home, idle, a great deal in the last ten days ... and I have written nothing permanent, nothing.

I am thinking of stopping this journal. Stopping mouth organ. Stopping everything, just vanishing for a while until I write. Never at any time in my life have I written so much and had it matter so little.

I have spent nearly the entire day typing, except for the last two hours. And none of it, none of it, will be relevant the day after tomorrow. These postcards are a lot of fun and very helpful to me and they have the lifespan of a mayfly. Email vanishes even faster. Ephemera.

I cannot draw. I spent the last hour or so completing a mixed-media painting I've been working on. It's a drawing of Lust. You know, like the deadly sin? I got a mental image the other night, clear as a bell, of what each of the deadly sins would look like if they were personified. And I can't get it out, because I can't draw well enough to bring it to fruition. Just like the fifty million graphic-novel-style ideas I've visualized. Forget it.

I have a bunch of new self-portrait photos Nonelvis helped with. I can't stand any of them. The makeup photographed poorly because it's so hard to take well-lit indoor photos without pro lights, and ... and I hate the way my face looks. I'm so upset that I'm thinking of ripping them into tiny pieces, just for catharsis.

I hope you weren't interested in any of my unfinished projects, because you'll never know how any of them come out. I know - I know how all my stories come out - but it'll be a cold day in hell, apparently, before I finish any of them.

Did you ever read Flowers For Algernon? Of course you did. I feel like the main character in that. I was brilliant once. Really. I was a kid genius. And now I'm only thirty years old and I can't find any of it. I don't want to write code, I don't want to write poetry, I don't want to write fiction. I just want to sit here and play games and talk about my life and read email.

Which is just fine and dandy except for the part of my brain which contains all my creativity, and which is getting ready to secede from the rest of me in frustration.

I am consumed with sadness and guilt and self-loathing and I think I will just roll in it for a while. Because god knows I am not getting anything else accomplished.

I don't even write anguished rants well.

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