The first blog of the rest of my life
Writing a blog has been my most difficult but worthwhile marathon. (Sidebar: I have never run a marathon.)
If I were the type of person to run a marathon, or the type of person to try running a long race, it would take me years to learn that discipline. One of my favorite books about writing is Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. The author, one of the most prolific writers ever, unlocks the boring, unavoidable truth about being prolific: it’s a steady acceptance of daily pain and failure. I view myself as a failure as far as writing goes because I haven’t written My Big Thing yet, whether that’s a blog or it’s a screenplay or a novel. One day, I will have done all of those things and it will seem to people like I always had a work ethic, or like I was the kind of kid who did well in school and always handed in A-papers on the first draft.
I wish I had more of a fake-it-til-I-make-it attitude but I was not that kind of student. I can’t even allow readers to think that of me. In school, I languished. Deadlines, in particular, eluded me. To this day, I use the phrase “the elusive deadline,” in all seriousness, when I talk with editors. That’s my way of warning them about the nature of my impotence. The idea of any limits innately blocks me. But writing isn’t an innate process. The inclination toward art is not innate either, though much of society believes it is.
”Oh, well he’s this way or that way because he’s an artist. They can’t be this or that regimented thing.”
Adulthood has shown me that the most disciplined, rigorous (and frankly sad) people I know are working artists. We chip away for years and years until we earn the validation, money and (tiny) peace of mind that comes with fully occupying an artist’s life. And this, like much of our plight, registers as unsatisfactory. The work of being an artist doesn’t make me feel more loved or more present. It doesn’t make me feel like I’m my mother’s favorite child. (I’m her only child.) You would think that it did offer some of that fulfillment or euphoria given how much time goes into laying yourself before others for judgment. Splaying your drafted, raw thoughts to the masses is brutal, though, and never stops being brutal. Writers and artists are masochists whose eternal punishment is our perceived inability to do anything else and SO WE MUST WRITE. The only euphoric feeling that I’ve had in life comes from drugs and sex, and even those moments pass. Sometimes they don’t pass because I do a lot of drugging or sexing to capture the feeling of constant happiness that humans foolishly seek. The most I can do is prolong a feeling of happiness for a few days before a good month of crippling depression.
Murakami’s approach, learned with age and the specter of mortality, is the right one: Seek pain if you’d like to become an effective artist. I understand that now. But understanding a concept of that type is different than living it. So this is my attempt at running my marathon. I know from years of working out that it’s easy to exercise on sunny days in the summer. That’s why the gym is crowded on 98-degree days in June and August. The weight rooms are sparse on 38-degree days in December. Writing — the kind of writing I want to do — is a negative-22-degree day in the post-climate change deep freeze. The writing I want to do is a marathon in heat of a Saudi drought. This writing plans for the extremes by engaging the 38-degree days as often as I can.
I’ve written a blog here as a record. I hope that it helps someone to face their pain and run their marathon. But unlike the 26-mile race, no runner’s high awaits you after a long day of paragraphs. You’ll be lucky if someone reads it. I’ll be busy the rest of today and forever forcing my friends to read this so I can call myself a writer.
Cheers!