The Writer Who Wouldn't Write

We've All Felt This Way, Right?

I’m starting to believe that my creativity has died. That it has vanished into the ether, like my youth and my disposable income. When I was 23 I had the imagination to write whatever I wanted. I wasn’t as good a writer as I am now, in the technical sense – I was full of the energetic impatience of youth. I was cocky, using unnecessarily big words and glib cliches. I’m a better writer now, but bereft; back then, I was full of ideas. They fell of my fingers and onto the screen like the alcohol and drugs that got splashed and swallowed and snorted into my young body. Now it’s difficult for me to even come up with an idea for this fucking blog. I try to find funny, interesting stories about my domestic life to write about – and I know they’re there, because my kids are fucking mental – but there’s only so many blog posts I can write about not getting enough sleep, or trying to be a good parent while depressed. And outside of my domestic life, I have no life. Save work, which I don’t write about much, because I would like to remain unfired.

When I was twenty-three, I didn’t have the time to write. I was a burgeoning alcoholic. My weekends were spent on booze-fueled quest for trashy chicks in trashier nightclubs. My weekdays were spent fueling my weekends. I was young, drunk and full of spunk. My passion for writing was pushed aside as I lived the life of a typical twentysomething with more balls than brains. I guess I assumed my writing would be waiting for me. That it would marinate, and I would come back to it. But that's not quite how it works. As I grew older I became frustrated by my lack of forward momentum. I wrote bit-parts of novels and essays with little or no passion or direction. The people – family and friends – who encouraged and lauded me, stopped asking me about my writing "career", some asked when I would get a real one. It became an embarrassment, a noose around my neck. David the writer, became David who can't find his direction. So I quit.

Slowly my depression grew. I'm not going to tell you that the loss of my dream and the acceleration of my mental illness were in any way analogous, but they certainly complemented one another. Eventually the party started to wind down. When the music stopped and everybody left, I sat at the bar drinking bottom shelf liquor and bemoaning the gaping hole in my life.

I met my wife around the time I decided to wind down the partying lifestyle. I kept drinking; I just did a lot more of it alone. You can strip away the friends, and the music and the flashy lights, but as long as you have the booze, as long as you get the buzz, none of that matters. I hadn't yet realized I was an alcoholic, because I hadn't tried to stop. That's when you know she has you in her clutches: when you try to leave her, but you keep on coming back. 

It seemed the more I drank, the less I wrote. The less I wrote, the less I felt like a writer. Until I stopped completely. Of course life moved on, as it always does. My wife and I got married and had kids; we eventually faced my addiction, and I failed and failed and failed at conquering it. I had some dry spells, but I'd gradually ease back into casual drinking, and then one night I'd get fucked up and vomit in the bath tub, and I'd start again on the long path to sobriety.

One day, three or four May's ago, the air tingling with the onset of summer and my wife's trust returning, I asked her could I spend some time alone writing. Our son was 6 months old and we lived in a small apartment where space was an issue. So every Monday morning, for a few months, I took myself down to the public library and wrote for a few hours on end. This was perfect, because I was doing a lot of reading: and discovered some wonderful novels in this time. Anyway, I had the idea of writing a thriller/revenge novel. The idea wasn't blistering, but it was okay, and I figured if I could write it well, it would be unique and interesting. After four weeks, I read over it, and it was shit. Absolute garbage. The pacing was all wrong; it read more like a synopsis than a script. It was cheesy and without of any kind of originality or ingenuity. I was gutted. I sat in shock for about twenty minutes, then I got up returned my books to the lady at the counter, and quit writing. Then I went for a beer.

And that leads me to this blog. Which I started sometime in January. Some two and a half years later. I wasn't writing for popularity, or for traffic, or to promote anything; I was just writing for the sake of it: For myself. Although I have to admit I am absolutely thrilled that I have a small few regular readers who seem to love what I write. I'm grateful for their support. So what's this post all about then? Why do I feel my creativity has left me? The answer is: I don't know.

I'm not quitting writing again, or anything rash like that. I need to return to fiction. I need to start reading again, and writing down the ideas that come to me. I need to work those mental muscles so I can produce ideas I'm proud of, not staring at the screen wondering if I should buy a puppy just so I can write a blog post about him shitting on the floor. So maybe this blog will take a back seat a little. Maybe it'll be the stepping stone back into serious writing – which is what I intended it to be in the first place. 

So if I occasionally disappear for a little while, don't panic; I'm not gone anywhere. I've just got some other stuff going on. And maybe I'll even send you all a signed copy of my first novel. After all, guy can dream.

Old Man

Get me off the damn Interweb!

I’m dealing with getting older well. At least I think I am. No longer do I pass frivolous nights in garish bars, trying hard to drown in a well of booze, trying hard to entice women who maybe pass for a seven (when drunk) back to my place for coffee – coffee and sex, trying hard to fit as many pills or powder into my stupid young head, trying hard to balance a lifestyle of excessive vapidity and vapid excess with my sanity. I spent most of my twenties (and some of my teens) living for the weekend, a weekend entailing the above, but with hangovers – I never mentioned the hangovers. Of course, I don’t miss it. It sounds hideous to me; ok I’ve just written it to sound hideous, but looking back it was a truly grotesque way of life. And yeah I’m dealing with the absence of that in my life really well.

 Don’t get me wrong, the hardest part of being a teetotal dad of two younglings and husband of a wife, who’s been unwell of late, is the boredom. The incessant, merciless torrent of boredom. You might think your Saturday nights have dried up a little recently: a bottle of wine and some friends around for a DVD, perhaps; maybe some take out and an early night with your significant other, and a cuddle before the lights go out, wink wink; fuck it, maybe you’re in prison or homeless or a ten year old. Doesn’t matter. You’re still having more fun than me. Last Saturday night, I had the pleasure of watching the movie “Hop” three times in a row before being puked on by both my kids. Meanwhile my wife was upstairs, herself puking – I alone was the only non-puker in my family, and still I would have killed to swap places with her. So later I had to change my daughter’s shitty diaper, which was a fucking delight, because she wasn’t yet finished, so I got to watch that. It went from green to a mustard-yellow color (it looked a bit like mint and butterscotch frozen yogurt, but it did not, repeat: NOT smell like mint and butterscotch frozen yogurt). My wife then felt better just long enough to hold my baby girl (Eva the Diva, as we like to call her, does not like not being held. Ever. I mean EVER… ha ha ha, it’s enough to drive one crazy. Weird huh?) just long enough for me to put my son to bed. Upon his insistence, I told him Goldilocks and the Three Bears about twenty times before he finally settled long enough to sleep. At Ten. Fucking. O. Clock! Finally, I got some alone time with my wife, which lasted about nine seconds before we both crashed into Slumberville.

So yeah, I’m dealing with that aspect of getting older real well. But as I approach my mid thirties (34 is NOT yet mid-thirties; it’s late, early thirties), I’m starting to notice a few …changes. I have bona fide white hairs now. There aren’t many, only one or two, but they’re there, and they weren’t there before. I’m getting aches and pains: I have this tightness inside my shoulder blade that I can never seem to stretch out; and my back… my back is like a game of fucking Jenga. And I can’t get away with eating crap, and not working out anymore. My metabolism is like a steel mill in the rust belt in the 80’s – grinding to a fucking halt. I have zero baldness yet, but I’m getting back-pubes to match my chest-pubes. It’s gross, and I’m too lazy/cheap to get it waxed. Seriously, if the hair doesn’t stop, I’m gonna look like I'm wearing a sweater... under my shirt.

I’m turning into an old grouch too. I don’t like modern music; I don’t understand modern clothes – skinny jeans on girls are great; on guys, not so much. I complain a lot – Exhibit A: This blog. I yell at slow drivers; I yell at fast drivers; I yell at pedestrians; I hit people on bikes. If I had a walking stick I’d shake it at people. A lot. The weather is a fairly prevalent recipient of my wrath; I’m an Irishman living in Oregon, go figure. I’m a pre-middle aged fogey, and guess what? I love it. If I didn’t have anything to complain about, I’d complain about that too. It’s the best thing about growing old, and the older I get, the more cantankerous I get to be.

Now where the hell did I leave my damn pipe and slippers?

Picture Perfect

That good-looking guy in my profile picture, right there at the bottom of my sidebar. That guy in black and white, with the cheesy smile and the scruffy-chic hair? Yeah, he's a lie. He doesn't exist. The guy writing this is an older, fatter version. Don't get me wrong, that's definitely me, it's just me four or five years ago, before I had kids, before I got married, and before I quit the gym and stopped kidding myself that protein shakes were an adequate substitution for cheeseburgers.

"How could you deceive us like this?" I hear you cry. "We thought you were a moderately good-looking youngish man, and now we find you are an average looking, average aged man! The lies!!!! The lies!!!" Well I'm sorry, but there are a number of reasons for my betrayal. Firstly, it's what my mother would call a "white lie", it's technically not entirely a mistruth, and who is it really hurting (aside from the lustful young ladies whose dreams and hopes have been shattered)? I could look like that again, if I liked. Aside from the extra twenty...ish pounds I've added, I'm aging quite well. No crow’s feet, no grey hairs. I could hit the gym, and purge myself of fast food and soda. And chocolate. And ice cream and cake. And... well, and pretty much everything I eat. I could start buying my clothes at A&F again (with da popped colla!), and go back to fancy expensive hair salons (yes, I was one of those guys). I could use moisturizer and exfoliate. And I would look at least as good as that guy. Probably better (truth be told, I was already beginning to tank when this was taken – I'd, by now, hooked my wife into a long term relationship). So really, that guy still exists: I just ate him. 

Another reason I don't have a more recent picture is because there are literally no good photos of me in existence since the turn of the decade. I don't just mean because I've let myself go. I still have the same face, and while I'm no George Clooney, I'm certainly not Quasimodo's twin brother either. I just don't have any pictures where I'm sober, or smiling, or without a wan paper-thin smile draped over thick layers of anxiety and depression. Most of the portraits I've taken recently have been with my newborn daughter. Or with my son. In most of those I look exactly like the dad of two small kids: like I haven't shaved in days, like I'm  about six weeks overdue on a haircut, like I look as if I maybe had a quick shower -- we're talking "Apply, Lather, Rinse". No fucking "Repeat" for me. Not on my son's watch.

There's more to it than that though (and this is where the sad, dramatic, violin-ey music comes in). Look at me. Look at how fucking relaxed I am. We're not talking stiff-drink-and-a-valium-relaxed either. Which was my go-to source of relaxation for most of my adult life. We're talking the kind of relaxation that comes with being in love, without a care in the world, free of all responsibility, with a healthy disposable income, and a penchant for having fun. I’m on vacation, having cocktails and cheesecake Goddammit! This photograph fell within a three month window when I felt completely free. And it shows in that photo. And in all the other photos since, I haven't fucking felt that way. And that shows too. I'm happy, and I'm deeply in love – with my wife and my kids. I'm financially dependent, and I'm healthy, but that's maybe one of two times in my adult life when I've felt like I had the universe by the balls. The other was when I was 20, which doesn't really count. And I probably won't feel this way again until I'm an old man... and that's ok.

After you have kids, nothing is ever the same again. You start to see the world differently; everything becomes a "what if", or a "but maybe" or a "oh shit". You know when you're a teenager and you steal your dad's Ferrari and drive it all around Chicago, and you're worried about your cocky best friend scratching it, well multiply that by a fucking million when you have kids. When the weight of every poor parenting decision, every strange looking rash, every heart-ending moment when you lose sight of your kid for a millisecond at the mall or the playground, stays with you day and night, you know then that you'll never quite relive your carefree twenties. But I wouldn't swap a second with my two little Ferraris for one more photograph like that. Being a parent is the hardest, most taxing, most willfully, endlessly stressful thing you'll ever endure, and yet it's worth every second of it.

Clowning Around

Joining a Circus with Dental Insurance was top of his wishlist

Pennywise the clown. That fucker haunted my dreams for years. He lurked in the shadows of my bedroom, hid between the cracked alleyways that dotted my hometown. He was everywhere I feared and many places I didn’t. I should never have watched that fucking movie: Stephen King’s “It”. I begged my Mother to let me rent it. I promised her it wasn’t that scary. “It’s about a clown, Mom,” I urged, “how scary can it be?” “It’s about an evil clown.” She countered. “A rogue clown, Mom. A clown who’s been chewed up and spat out by society. A misunderstood clown who’s made some wrong turns in life, and is trying to find some semblance of normalcy in his baggy-panted, white-faced, red-nosed existence.” Twelve year-old me probably didn’t say that, but either way she bought it. In reality, it was about an evil clown – one who feasted on the dreams and also the flesh (an important detail) of children.

Being a child myself, and knowing first-hand that clowns existed, and that any adult man, who painted his face and traveled around with a circus under the guise of entertaining kids, was almost certainly pure evil, I found this movie somewhat unsettling. Or put more succinctly: I didn’t sleep for almost a year.

Let’s cut to the fucking chase: clowns are weird. Anyone who aspires to be a clown is fucking weird, and anyone who has made enough poor decisions in life that they find themselves employed as a clown, is fucking weird. At face value, the concept of a clown is to entertain children. But let’s look a little closer at this supposition: The modern clown began as vaudevillian characters in French theater. You had the whiteface or ‘blanc’ clown, who would essentially abuse the lower class, or ‘auguste’ clowns. They did this with their faces plastered in colored face-paint, because, y’know, that’s hilarious and all. Later, common to North America, came the ‘hobo’ clowns, these are the guys who look like they’ve just murdered and raped some kids, and smell of piss. They’re usually sullen and grumpy and derive much pleasure from the physical (and one would imagine mental) abuse of their peers. Obviously anyone who can’t see the hilarity in that is lacking in the very basic tenets of a sense of humor.

Somewhere along the lines, people realized that these guys weren’t so much funny, as freaky-looking fuckers, and that rather than tickle the funny bone, they instead stomped all over their fear receptors. Horror writers, such as the aforementioned Stephen King, began to write clowns as the horrible, monstrous beings they are. Over the past twenty years there has been a flurry of terrifying clown movies. Clowns, as a source of joy, entertainment and gaiety, have virtually been wiped off the map (which is a good thing). Of course, many of these clowns have freaky-ass evil faces, as you can see on thiswebsite. But this isn’t even necessary. If, like me, you have a true fear of clowns, you’ll agree it’s the regular old middle-aged men with sad expressions and painted on grimacing smiles that are the most sinister. Except for Pennywise – the granddaddy of them all – who flips with consummate ease between creepy regular clown guy, and soul-petrifying monster, whenever those meddling kids piss him off.

His owner not willing to take a chance, poor Gizmo starved to death.

Of course, it wasn’t just clowns I was afraid of: Gremlins scared every shade of shit out of me. And a question: WHEN THE FUCK DOES “AFTER MIDNIGHT” END? 6am? 9am? Fucking when can I feed my pet, without him attempting to murder me and everyone I love? And I accidentally saw “Aliens” when I was eleven. I vomited that night, and every day for about six months I went to bed with anxiety that I had an Alien hitch-hiking in my chest. In fact, as a kid I was afraid of fucking everything: vampires, aliens, banshees scared the living bejeesus out of me (If you see one you die? How fucking unfair is that? Gimme at least a chance of escape, for fuck sake). On top of all these grotesque creatures of the night, I also possessed a vague fear of just your random, garden variety, amorphous type of monster; the ones that you never did see, but you knew looked all kind of monstery – a bit like the ones you see in “Monsters INC.” but less cute and more terrifying.

And then it stopped. All of it. I realized that the really frightening things in life were real. There were no Bogeymen hiding under my bed. There were actual real-life terrors waiting to strike at any moment. When my Dad was diagnosed with Cancer, just after my eighteenth birthday, I realized that adult life was a hell of a lot fucking scarier, than my childhood imaginings. Fears didn’t hide in the shadows; they jumped out and face-raped you in broad daylight. By the time my dad died, and I dropped out of college, got myself in debt, had my heart broken a couple of times, and been diagnosed with depression, I was no longer frightened of things that go bump in the night. I’d lie in bed at night willing them to come take me away.

Nowadays, things are much better for me: I have a beautiful wife; two amazing kids; a good job; depression still rears its head sometimes, but never for long; debt … debt still sucks, but I can handle it. I’m still afraid, of what the future holds for my kids, of how they’ll navigate school and the lure of sex and drugs in their teens, of their job prospects twenty years from now. I sometimes worry about my wife’s health, about my health – was my Dad’s illness genetic, or just bad fucking luck? But these fears don’t paralyze me; I still wake up in the morning and go to work, or make my son breakfast and watch cartoons with him. And I’ll be there for both of my kids when they get scared that there may or may not be an evil child-murdering clown in their closet. I might even check it out for them. Either that or run screaming for the door.

Our Last Dance Together...

I’ve started listening to The Cure again, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I first started properly listening to The Cure after my first ever session of therapy. I had been experiencing emotional pain that I hadn’t known possible. It scared the shit out of me, to be honest. When you think of physical pain, you have a map of it in your head. You may never have had your hand chopped off, but you can kinda, maybe take your mind to that place; to how horrible that might feel. But emotionally, I was in uncharted waters. Until then.

I rode the bus there – I think I had intended to drink heavily afterwards, or before… during if I could swing it – but because the session with my therapist went so well, and because I vomited all this congealing, rotting bile of emotion onto her office floor, and because afterwards I felt a glimmer of hope, and maybe because it was a crisp October afternoon, I decided to just walk home. Past the bars, past the liquor stores: just home. I had bought Disintegration a few days before. My ex and I had liked some of their more upbeat tunes. The poppiness of Just Like Heaven, and Friday I’m In Love along with a bunch of other favorites bands from our past had added a flavor of blitheness to the previous summer. I guess I’d never been a huge fan of theirs before that but I picked up a copy of the album few weeks before our split. Though I hadn’t yet listened to it. Couldn’t, if I’m honest.

I put it in my Discman (I’m not gonna lie – I’m old) and listened to it on the walk home. And I didn’t stop listening for the rest of my twenties. Robert Smith’s lyrics and music were simply who I was – and, more importantly, the part of me I couldn’t figure out – converted from brain chemistry to sound. They fucking echoed through every cell in my body. And for the next five years every friend, girlfriend, family member, colleague, shop-teller, fucking passer-by were bombarded by my obsession with this band.

The break-up with the ex had destroyed me. I sometimes wonder how I survived it. That kind of trauma can’t be compared to a physical suffering, because if it had been physical I wouldn’t have survived (there were many physical side-effects: I lost a shit-ton of weight, and essentially became an alcoholic around then, for example, but the white-hot core of agony was purely emotional). Still, to try to give it some context, I liken it to a car crash. A sickening smash from which I emerged forever changed – scarred and disfigured.

And then the pain kind of reached a breaking point, whereby for no other reason than it simply could not get any worse, it had to start getting better. Like when you’re travelling so far away from home, you eventually reach a point where you’re returning. That’s what happened that day, the day I bawled my eyes out in my therapist’s office, and listened to Disintegration in full for the first time. And there I found something just like me; with exactly as much shadow as light, and exactly as much hope as despair.

Eventually I started to recover. I fell in love again. I matured. I got married and had kids. I bought an iPod and put fucking Britney Spears on it – gym music. I started listening to Just Like Heaven and Friday I’m In Love again. Eighties rock became my soundtrack. In a way (Oh God, this is corny as fuck) I felt like I was cured (barf!). The scars have faded; like little silver ribbons, they remain a part of me. I’m better for them, but I wish they weren’t there. And I still miss the ex from time to time; in ways that it shouldn’t, my heart sinks when I remember her. But it never lasts long.

I have therapy tomorrow. It’s my second visit. And no, I haven’t cried yet. Shit happens: I sometimes find it hard to cope with stuff. I can feel blue too easily. I suffer from fucking depression and alcoholism – it’s clearly not a bunch of flowers. But I’ve a good job, a great wife, an amazing son, and a daughter on the way. I’m just listening to The Cure again, well… because they’re awesome!

0,-1,-2... Dammit

Nokia 3210. My First True Love. I'm OK, it's just a bit... dusty in here, is all!

There was once a very brief but glorious period of time in the history of humankind. I like to call it the 'Golden Age of Human Interaction'. It was perhaps a circumstance of my age, my social circle, and my locale. But the best we ever had it, was when text messages were limited to 160 characters. Do you remember that? 

I refer to my age, and location, because I was earning way too little money to actually waste time with dialogue, and pay-as-you-go credit was by far the cheapest way to afford to use a phone in 00's Ireland. So we – my friends and I – were limited to having exchanges of verbal communication using 160 characters or less. "Coming out tonight?", "Can't. Sorry.", "Why not?", "Exam in the morning.", "Cool. What about the weekend?", "Sounds good." That was it: Conversation over. Back to dial-up internet porn before the page had even loaded her boobs.

Of course, like Icarus and his obscenely strong arms, ever reaching toward the sun with those waxy wings that somehow melted in cooler air, we didn't realize how good we had it. There were those conversations (usually with girlfriends) when you needed to squeeze those extra digits into 160 measly little spots. Some among us, like the little Orwellian prophecies that we were, figured ways around this: we used numbers as words, and letters became syllables. Ever straining at the leash of technological boundary we began to revert back to a primal state. Utterances such as "Cn u cum out l8r", became commonplace. Something had to be done. And eventually, phone companies caved, and allowed long, gaudy paragraphs of deep, tortuous insight, and fumbling explanations that trailed on and on about why "It was a joke. Everybody knows sarcasm doesn't come across on texts. I didn't really mean you're a fucking loser." to come in to being. We had eaten the forbidden fruit, and were banished from our Eden of brief, concise and above all only-when-fucking-necessary communication.

It's maybe why I like Twitter so much. I'm not particularly active on Twitter, but that's simply because I've no fucking friends (I probably lost them all when texts got longer, and they discovered I was a jerk). And because my kids aren't old enough to embarrass yet. But I love how the focus is strictly on getting the information across, and not the means of doing it. If you want to get into get into a debate about sports with @bobsadick, then you better damn well have your facts at hand. It's the one true pulpit of social media with which to get your words out. Sure, you can scream and shout about religion, and post shitty pictures of your dinner, just as you can on hovels such as Facebook and the thankfully dead and buried MySpace. But it's all garbage there; nothing else. At least on twitter, there's a chance, an outside shot you can discuss with a respected journalist, or scientist, or -- fuck it -- celebrity something you give a shit about.

And then, of course, it's the greatest filter of intellectual vapidity known to man. As my super-awesomeblogger buddy proves, when you're truly thick as shit, you can't hide behind waffle and bullshit to deflect from the true absence of character or ethos within you (I'm looking in your direction, Kim K). When you truly have nothing to say, say it on twitter, and give us all a good ol' knee-slapping chuckle. It's the least you can do for suffocating us with your bullshit lives on every magazine stand and TV station.