A look at the ways I’ve tricked myself into writing (or not)
I can’t write for shit. I don’t mean that the things I do write are bad but that, as a practice, I am horrible at this. Writing agonizes me in a way that, if I passed Kafka on the street, we’d high-five in recognition of each other’s inabilities, then we’d both continue to not write. Sometimes I sit at this device and it feels like I am wringing sweat from a rag. Drips and drops, if anything at all. It can be awful. Waiting for nothing, hoping for something. Anything.
To counteract this foolishly voluntary pain I do everything possible…
The cycle continues. I, of course, am going to miss a— let’s be real — somewhat self-imposed deadline for submitting a novel draft. For the past four months I’ve been trying to work on a project that an agent I greatly respect wanted to see, and I’ll still try to finish it, but not anywhere near when I should have. I feel a great guilt over this, then I feel guilty for wallowing in any kind of personal disappointment in the face of a global pandemic.
I got more important things to be depressed about. My back has been messed…
I feel like I am experiencing life without my body for the first time, and it scares me. …
As a kid I used to count down things in my head. I would stare out the window of my second-floor bedroom and wait for people. We lives on a dead end street so I would watch the fork in the road; someone could either go up the hill or to our house. I would watch out the window for anybody. It could be my parents coming back from work or the store, it could be a buddy or a girlfriend; it was often just me waiting for a car to drive by. Just anyone at all. “10, 9, 8…
“I heard you got in a fight,” my cellie, Mickey, said.
Hands behind my head on the top bunk, I said, “It wasn’t a big deal.” Me and another dumb kid had a two minute fight in his cell. We grappled for a moment before he wrapped me up, switching off free hands to swipe at me, landing one on my chin; I slammed him into the wall with my back until he fell onto the bottom bunk. I threw rabbit punches into the back of his head. This hurt my knuckles more than his skull, but eventually the kid…
My last thing, On Top of Slag Mountain, started out as a status update on Facebook. I wanted to write something small as well as I could without overthinking it. One line I did rework several times was when I mentioned the other kids at the mall buying whatever they wanted while my shoes were being held together by duct tape. Originally the line was while my family was too poor for me to do likewise. Then it was while my family couldn’t afford for me to do likewise. That changed to we weren’t rich and so on. It kept…
The Walmart in West Mifflin is built on Brown’s Dump, also known as Slag Mountain. This slag was dropped off by trains from all of the surrounding steel mills around Pittsburgh. At the time the Walmart was proposed, there was concern that the earth hadn’t settled yet and the store would collapse in an avalanche of cheap junk. Truly, there was worry that the prices would keep on rolling, but down onto the streets below. Earlier this morning I was waiting for a bus to go back home, standing on top of Slag Mountain. …
Everybody knew the McDonald’s at the Waterfront was selling theraflu stamp bags, and I guess I’d heard how bad it was for you — they’d had reports of dumbasses ODing on channel 2, 4, and 11 — but it was a lot stronger than regular heroin and a lot cheaper and it was really a bad winter for me. The Pretty Kitty closed down because of everything in the back, and there weren’t many places for me to go except the booths, like half a mile down 8th. The girl there, Vanessa, she told me about the shit, how much…
The lock came off easy — they only screwed a hinged hasp on the outside — it took a hard shove to get past a chair barricading the door. As I pushed my way in I heard a screeching crash. Lucky nobody was around. It was my first time bidding on a sheriff’s sale property, and the fact that you weren’t allowed to see the inside made no sense. I’d saved up a few thousand dollars I wanted to keep out of the bank. After the divorce, I didn’t trust money I couldn’t hold in my hands. …
Kasper and I are smashing fluorescent light tubes on the ground behind the Dollar Tree, swinging them down like apes with clubs, the world itself our victim. We found the fluorescents sticking out from the store’s dumpster, then a handful of large, industrial bulbs which we treat like precious jewels, especially after Kasper lets the first one slip before he even gets a toss off; it falls with a depressing pop and it’s agreed that I will handle the bulbs, since I was fifth in the rotation freshman year until Mr. …
