Semi-Urban Cartography

Something Says The Ride Is Drawing To A Close

In my thoughts frequently these days is the idea that being creative is an act of self-preservation. For some. I get up two hours earlier than necessary to write each morning because I spiritually have to; in my day-to-day work, encounters stage as events in a larger fictional realm; the gumption to get up the next day is a matter of remaining strong in the face of obscurity. Too much is written about how lonesome the interior world of a writer is but it cannot be underscored. A writer writes each morning the way everyone inevitably dies at the end of their life: alone.

To make more of it would be exaggeration.

I’ll admit that I’ve been my own handicap. In the last few years I’ve allowed myself to be pulled into a mass morality that has been for me an act of sabotage. My first twenty or twenty five years as a writer were spent in a closet of my own creation. No one cared what I was doing or related to it and I understood that. I used that callousness I felt as grist to my mill. It fueled me to find a better, more effective way to write and create. Again, too much might be said of this, but I corralled the anger I felt at being alone and used it. The feeling of letting myself die each time I expressed emotion was its own perpetual motion device.

That mass morality I’ve sabotaged myself with recently has been the misguided instinct to open up. I came out of the closet. I began to brandish this creative thing like it actually mattered to those outside my door. Making the world “aware” of me sounded good in as much as in the liberal, NPR loving world, awareness is its own reward. This is the same morality that gives us a National Rwanda Awareness Day and other shit like that. I held a four or five year “Erick Is A Writer” awareness campaign — for what though? To live within the punchline of some cliche? Drumming up that awareness turns out to be more exhausting than anything I’ve ever done. Those same people who weren’t interested then aren’t now (they never were) the difference is I felt this unnecessary compulsion to beat until raw fisted against the walls of my cell. If you’re not interested, I believed. Then the least I’m going to do is tell you what you’re missing.

Who was I kidding?

2010 brings me full circle. I’m feeling each morning it’s harder and harder to die although I know it’s what is absolutely necessary. I burned hot and bright at one time and now I’ve diverted so much to this campaign I’m exhausted. To allow someone to die alone seems an awful fate, but it’s what I want for myself and what I’m going to demand from those around me. It seems the only means to feel alive again. That anger, which was always there yet only supressed can finally crack free. The way a body feels exhausted/invigorated by a laugh, I want to feel through my old familiar growl.

Sabotaging my own success was that sense that anyone else deserved a reminder to give a damn. They don’t. They never really did anyway. People don’t really want to know what motivates you or makes you churn. They want cream. They’ll ask for it sweet or iced. Whatever form — give it to me.

I’m a fool for not seeing that earlier. Yet there is a sense of empowerment that I’ve realized this truth now before it was too late.