All Results Negative

9.19 SAT

Yesterday I took my background check. I went to a facility and peed in a cup. The first time I did my piss was too cold. It’s impossible to make yourself pee again. So I downed five cups of water and sat for another twenty minutes. But I was clear! A whole month of discipline! I can’t tell you how rewarding it was to see “all results negative” scribbled in that lady’s handwriting.

Afterwards I smoked a bit with my coworkers. Just a few puffs and I was feeling good. I had been curious to know how I’d respond to it again. All my tables tipped 20%.

Tonight I bought a gram from the dish washer. I smoked a mini blunt and sat around enjoying myself. Then I got this urge to journal. Highs take me higher. I feel reenergized. I feel like tackling this writing challenge in my own, crazy way.

I haven’t worked on my stories in over two whole weeks. I’ve lost all motivation and hope for school.

Okay, there’s one drop of hope in the bucket. I was blantantly ignoring the big, ugly gap stretched out ahead of me. I had one hope, and that was that I’d pull it together at the last minute and apply myself before the deadline.

So, yeah, I’m a little stoned. I know I sound crazy. But this is how I FEEL, and I’ve been ignoring it, looking off at some dumb butterfly in the wood behind me because I’m a part of a crazy ADD generation, and because I’m too scared to dive down. I’m scared and lazy and I won’t even try.

I’m scared of rejection.

And bam! I just got down to it. Insecurities.

And I’m faced with this problem of the audience. I don’t know what to say to them, and I don’t think my words will weigh much. I see a coliseum, this packed out theater of people; My audience is too general.

I see a court; Still too general.

I see a common group of people who all feel the same way, face the same thing.

I see the individuals. I focus on the faces.

In Deep training they told us to push the kid further, to encourage them to go deeper. I must do the same in my writing. I started this entry intending to address my blog audience (so hi, guys) and then, as I dove deeper, I began speaking to myself.

So writers are crazy.

And now, addressing a broader audience once more (yes, you), I think that I can do this, I think that I’ll try, I’ll actually try. And I think that you should, too.

SOML

———

So now I’m planning my Deep lesson. While doing that I ran into these bad boys:

One thing I puzzled over in my writing from very early on what how to bridge what seemed to me to be a great chasm between the prose I used in my letters and the journals and the prose I used in my fiction. The vast difference between these two kids of writing troubled me when I was younger, in part because I wrote much better and more fluid prose in letter and in journals that in my stories. If you have journals or if you’ve kept any of your own letters or e-mails, study them to see if you can detect a style that differs from the prose you use in your fiction. Fiction in the twentieth century has attempted to tell its stories in more direct, emotionally honest, and less artificial ways– in other words, twentieth-century fiction has tried to fudge the distinction between the public and private utterance.

The 3 AM Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercies That Transform Your Fiction, Brian Kiteley

And: Why I Write by Terry Tempest Williams (read this.)