Mundane confession and confusin' mussin': An unpostable post.

As ideas often do, this one has strayed from it's original purpose.  I think it has anyway.  The premise at first was to showcase my writing.  I suppose it's doing that.  However I think I had in mind short stories and essays (when I say essays I often just mean nonfiction short stories that I wrap around a moral or two relating to my life philosophies).

Instead, this project has become more of a, well...  Let's give this as a pretext:

"Why don't you write about that cop harassing you when he gave you that ticket?" asked my girlfriend.

"I just don't want the blog to become, well, a blog.  I don't want it to be a diary where I can whine about shitty things that happened to me.  I want it to be..."

"I understand" she said, nodding.

"I want it to be..."

"I think I get what you are saying" she insisted.

"I want it to be, well, more..."

"Totally understand what you are trying to say"

"More trans... transcendent?"

"Gotcha."

Transcendent then.  Perhaps that's too lofty for posts on a blog.

Universal works too.  But what does that actually mean?  Something every human being can relate to on some level? 

Let's try relatable to at least one person who can read it and feel something from it.  Gain something, no matter how infinitesimally small. 

And I don't want my posts to whine.  So those are the two objectives.

Good.

I feel as though my last few posts have been more akin to therapy than anything else.  Instead of seeing a therapist (and who can afford it?  Cheaper to just let the mental disorder fester) I'm talking to you people, the few of me who read this, and allowing you a glimpse of something politely hidden in society.

Something I've always thought I should cover up with the guise of "fiction".

But the fear of being discovered, well, this is my point.  I can't be discovered if I lose the camouflage of "short stories" and just admit details of my life that bother me, things that affect me, things I use Freudian defense mechanisms to hide from myself and others.

(Perhaps I've been listening to too much Marc Maron's WTF podcast in which he interviews people in the comedy industry about depression, darkness, and "demons" inside themselves.  And now I seek that public redemption.)

So here is my confession for today.  A confession about my early short stories.  To celebrate my reaching of a milestone I set a while back- reaching 1k views on this blog.  Not much, but people decided 1000 times to see if I had a new post, to read a new post, or to just look and close it immediately.  One thousand times since April.

So this then, is my gift to you.  And myself.

I'd just finished vaporizing some cannabis during my 'semester of solitude' (just decided to call it that) at Indiana University.  I can't remember when during the semester I had what could be considered an epiphany, but was more likely just the unlocking of a truth I'd known all along.  Or to be less poetic, the weed allowed me to be more objective about my life than usual and I evaluated my writing.

And here is what I found: I was expressing my desires and intentions in my writing before I even knew they were my desires.  I think anyway.  Maybe a lot of people do this but it was horrifying to me.

Remember that movie with Will Farrell, Stranger than Fiction?  How he was a character in a book and the novelist was controlling his life by writing it?  In an instant I was convinced I was doing the same.  Panic.

Panic.

I'm glad I quit smoking pot, but still, even today, this thought haunts me.

Let's look at my evidence:

Story One: The Peasant Tree Farmer meets God-

I write about a guy who was a philosophy major doing blah blah blah.  Six months later I change my major to philosophy.

Not so much, but I hadn't decided I wanted to write at this point.  It was a rare hobby and nothing more at that point.

Story Two:  The Mountain Goats-

(I had an analogy about a mountain in the story, and song lyrics from the band in my story, and I needed a title.)

I was at IU at this point.  In a dorm. 

So I wrote a story about a guy who goes to a town far away from home, as an English major.  His roommate was an Art major who had dropped out but was coming back to school.  He had friends and partied, but was really dark and disturbed, running from the fact he didn't have a single ambition and had destroyed the one good thing in his life- his last relationship through self-destruction.


When I wrote the story, the guy, Ben I think, was supposed to be me in my mind.  It was a secret outside of my mind though.  And the roommate, Chris I think, was the guy Ben was supposed to envy at first as the person he wanted to become, but then realize he could become something in between by first exercising (I lost 50 pounds that year) and finding a girlfriend (I did).  He found a girlfriend at the end of the story.

The other thing going on in this story was I was having an imaginary war with my parents.  Pretending they wanted me to be something like a lawyer, and I didn't want to follow that path and there were intense arguments about it.  I did have an argument about it with my grand mother, but never with my parents, not really anyway.

So, perhaps these things are just a confirmation bias.  Actually I'm pretty sure it is.

Story Three- Asshole gets struck by lightening. 

Another avatar for me.  This time he has dropped out of school and is dealing with a long lost unrequited love.  Then he gets struck by lightning.

I haven't, yet, so no big deal.

Then the most recent story, one for the Machine of Death, was about a guy who had moved to a major city (as I am) in pursuit of a job as an artist (see, it's not me, this guy is an artist) as he graduated from college with an art degree (and he graduated!).

Eh.  Maybe I was wrong about all of this.  Considering deleting this post, but who gives a fuck.  You can see it. 

As a reward for my readers, instead of this failed confession, I'm going to start posting my older stuff.  Now, that older stuff is shit, but!  But I say, I will post them with commentary! 

Maybe, but maybe I'll start reading them and realize they are all terrible.  I'm not very reliable.  But so what?  I'm not getting paid here.  As a matter of fact, fuck all of you!  Draining me of all my creativity for free, for nothing in return, not even comments!

Kidding, of course.  I love you, dearest reader.

I'm trying to redeem this post with something, anything. 

Eh, forget it.  See you next time.