Maybe I'll Catch Fire

"There's an element of contempt for meanings. You want to write outside the usual framework. You want to dare readers to make a commitment you know they can't make. That's part of it. There's also the sense of drowning in information and in the mass awareness of things. Everybody seems to know everything. Subjects surface and are totally exhausted in a matter of days. The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, dear reader, if you went back to the living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here. This writer is working against the age and so he feels some satisfaction at not being widely read. He is diminished by an audience"

I promised myself that I wouldn't make this page a diary, that it wouldn't ever have to be about what I did today. If I felt I could fictionalise those things and make them funny or interesting or diverting, then yes. But never would I simply sit here and type out detail by detail exactly what I did with my day. Especially not when a life is as static as mine appears to be right now.

It's been a difficult day. That's all you really need to know. Here I am again, forcing all this sunlit frustration into the darkened glyphs of my prose. I feel very alone right now. With the door closed and the curtains drawn this could be my world. I'd be happier with that, I think. I could take all the news on the TV, the radio, and the internet as I take the stories I read and compose. Make it all fiction, make it all just words from somebody else's mind. Absorb what I need and let the rest fall away.

Nights like these I'm not sure I can deal with it anymore; the way they look at me and talk to me, the places I have to go, the pointless humiliations. I feel tired and overwhelmed. Everything is out of reach.

Six years now. I measure my life in sections. Birth to age thirteen, thirteen to nineteen, nineteen to twenty-five. Six years since I packed my things and left Cambridge, so sure that I'd found my way, that I could deal in words and it would be enough. Nineteen years old and so naive. I could do the wage-slave jobs. I could live with the constant insecurity. I could pull off this balancing act and it would eventually bear fruit.

I knew there would be times like this. How could there not be? I have a huge amount of confidence in myself and a healthy ego, but nobody is invulnerable, and everybody occasionally has those terrifying midnight moments where they look down and realise they can no longer see the safety net, that they've locked themselves into something permanent.

I can't do anything but this. I'm not playing favourites. I couldn't face a life chained to a career and settling for second-best, remembering those days when I was young and invulnerable and I shot for the moon without even considering the idea that I'd miss. I'd kill myself. Not out of self-pity and not for attention. I just wouldn't want to live that way. I couldn't cope with it. A year, maybe two, and I'd be one of those people that just started screaming one day and nobody understood why.

This is the way it has to be. If you ever wondered why, then those are my reasons. I don't want to be dead or insane. Seems pretty black-and-white from that perspective, doesn't it?