Eccentric Flower:201007/Maybe This Will Be Easier

The previous entry (and the poem before it) was about how it all goes wrong and why it's always always going to all go wrong every time I try to do it right. It was about how I got annoyed with Rhonda today even though I shouldn't have, and how I lost Andy, and how you and I don't think I'm saying the same things and this will always come between us - as indeed it did immediately, in the very first comment, before some of you even knew it was there.

But I did convolute it, and some of that was on purpose because I enjoyed firing my cannon at a dead man who can't shoot back, which should tell you several things none good, but the fact remains that picking on David Foster Wallace was probably the high point of my day.

Here's a simpler version from a much better writer. This is from Glen David Gold's book Sunnyside, which is not as good as Carter Beats the Devil, which is to say, it is merely phenomenally good, not brilliant.

I haven't gotten more than halfway into the book yet, and one of the reasons is that these two paragraphs keep coming back into my head to jeer at me.

I am not Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin was a genius. I thought I was a genius once. That was before I found out I was a hack.

But like Chaplin I have felt the exhaustion from one of my rhetorical trips, the relief, the thought, "I have saved myself" - and then once again it turns out I haven't.

At another point in the book a character tells Chaplin bluntly that the problem is he hasn't yet had a project, hasn't made a film, that is as good as he is.

I haven't yet had a project that's as good as I am. The difference is, unlike Chaplin, I don't have the ego or confidence or energy to know that one day I'll find it.

This isn't that project. It never has been. This is therapy, and it works fine as long as there's no audience to piss off. If I could play to an empty house it would be much better. The problem is I desperately want an audience - but not for this. It can't be for this. Having an audience here is a bad idea.

I'll keep posting here and I probably won't lock entries any more in the future than I have in the past. I don't see any reason to hide things, if you have some perverse interest in reading them. But I am going to uninstall the comment system and the user system, when I get around to it. I have to go back to assuming I am playing to an empty house. I have to go back to not knowing who I'm pissing off.

Once I do that, everyone will surely realize that when I make flaming, in-your-face statements, in my mind I am always shouting them at a mirror.

P.S. You know how to email me if you want to talk.