Sometimes

Sometimes intense discomfort and the inability to sleep can give one the extra kick in the newly wide and flat ass to finish embarassingly long overdue projects. For instance, I finally finished an article about No Tell Motel for the Carnegie Mellon English department alumni newsletter. I was supposed to finish it sometime around, hmm, Thanksgiving. But I was all anemic and sleepy and when I was awake I was working on No Tell or trying to write poems or finishing home projects or writing this goofy blog or reading your goofy blog or playing Warcraft.

So what do you think of the title: "How Personal Crisis Begat No Tell Motel"?

I'm not even sure if they'll be able to use it. I may have squandered that opportunity which would be a shame. But I finally finished it and I do feel a little satisfaction. One less thing for me to think about. There's still those literary journals I received in the fall that I read, but didn't write reviews for NewPages. I wonder if they keep an active shit list? In July I promised an editor of an online pub that I'd write a critical piece for their fall issue. A few nights later during a fit of insomnia I wrote out a bunch of notes about Foucault and other theorists being shoved down my throat as undergrad and how it fucked up my writing (my life?) for years. The next day I read my notes and well, the anger and instability frightened me and this was during my "Mommy shouldn't be nutty" or "Mommy should brush her hair every morning" period. Don't worry, I've moved past that and decided Mommy can indeed be nutty and mussy.

One of the few coherant bits from my notes go:

it was a way for people who had no true appreciation and found no joy in literature to become literary scholars. Maybe these people wanted to write novels and poems and plays, but couldn't so they decided to disassemble it all in the name of "studying" it. Even a Porsche isn't that impressive broken down into 500 parts. Or it's like seeing a beautiful woman. A normal hetero man would (properly) stand in awe of her loveliness. Only a demented serial killer would dissect her, lay all her organs out on a table and say "Not that pretty now, is she?"

Maybe I should write an essay about agreeing to write essays and then welching.

I should have came up with something else. The invitation to write the critical piece stemmed from his rejection of some poems I submitted. He could have just said "no thank you," but he was all "no, we can't use these, but we could use . . ." and that was nice and who am I to be turning my back on these opportunities? There may come a day when the only opportunities waiting in my inbox are by foreign businessmen, royalty and widows who will reward me handsomely if only I lend them my bank account number.