What Is This, Anyway?

So, this is one thing that I never figured I'd do...  Blog, I mean.  

See.  It's like this.  I had this preconception of blogs, rightly or wrongly.   I figured, by and large, blogs were generally for Reasonably Successful People in Media Fields Who Had Time on their Hands.  Authors, for instance.  Comic Book Creators.  Sports Columnists.  Not-Quite-Feature Reporters.   Or if the writers weren't successful, they fell into one of three easily classifiable bins: people with political agendas and needs to bash any party that wasn't theirs, thirty year-old geeks living in their moms' basements with an undying need to point out inconsistencies in superhero movies, and wannabe journalists in a culture that is otherwise laughing at journalism as a dead field.

I don't really fall into any of the three.  What I am, is lost. 

Eight years ago, I was... well, younger, for one thing.  But I was productive.  Constantly.  Daily.  Hourly.  I would sit there at the desk, a liter of Mountain Dew on one side of me, some sort of music blaring through my speakers-- depending on my mood, it could have been anything from Saint-Saëns to Scatterbrain to Styx-- and ashtray full of half-finished cigarettes accompanying the lit one in my hand, and I would write.   I worked an overnight shift doing security, and it required about half a brain to work the job, and the rest I could focus on writing about anything.  For hours.  Seriously, I could sit there, take any subject and say, "Three pages, write about X, go."  And by the end of the night (hell, most of the time, four hours into the night), there would be three pages of freshly steaming prose that would hurt your fingers to touch because it was so fucking sharp.  My bullshit was a worthwhile read.  I'm not trying to put on airs by saying that; I had people tell me that I needed to get myself published.

And then something happened.  The job went away, naturally-- any job you only have to expend half a brain on isn't going to pay you great cash. And I started taking Chantix to quit smoking because the cost of cigarettes was getting too high, and the health benefits of stopping were  worthwhile (I suppose they were, at least.  I mean, you do a lot more writing if you're not kinda dead.  But no one can ever tell me that my taking Chantix and stopping smoking wasn't the beginning of the end for me).  But that wasn't wholly it.  Somewhere along that time... I lost something.  Something important.  Something vital. 

When I was younger, there was a great need for me to tell stories.  There was an all-encompassing need to write.  It was like this great violent animal fury that built up inside me until I wrote to sate it-- kind of like a sexual crescendo, only without the Catholic guilt afterward.   I just needed to churn out prose, and I wrote like I wouldn't have my next meal if I didn't.  I constantly made the joke that at 50 I had every intention of stepping out in front of a bus, so I damned well needed to have all my good work out by then.  I was writing with desperation.  And, goddammit, it worked. 

Since then, I've lost that.  Maybe it's because I'm looking more at my health with the frailty of a nearly forty-year old than with the frivolity of a young man (one, in fact, who used to do double-shot coffees and ephedrine and smirk at the way he could hear his heart pounding through his eardrums.)  Maybe it's because there's more planned in my head for the future than living for the moment.  Maybe it's because I was so ingrained to music, Dew and smokes that once one was taken away, it killed all my creativity.  Maybe it's because the drugs nowadays just aren't as good.  It's really hard to say.  But I need to be able to write again.  And that's the reason this blog's around.  To get myself back to writing, like the title says, with desperation.

A quick note before I go this morning.  I listed this as an Adult Blog, not because I expect to be posting naked pictures or anything-- I sense sighs of relief from a lot of prospective readers on that one-- but because I really don't want to censor my thoughts, and my thoughts are usually teeming with profanities.  Also, to those of you I call out (and I'm sure I will call you out; this is a personal, subjective blog, after all, so you can sort of expect rampant opinion), try not to take it too hard... Blogger is available to anyone, so you can feel free to make a blog about what an ass I am, too.

L8.