Of Purpose v. Vacillation

It's a remarkable phenomenon: doing The Work IS the tonic for most ills: even amidst the greatest tumult, be it imagined or real, the very act of sitting and putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard restores balance; it restores that sense of purpose.

On the good days, I tell myself that this is the path I chose, this path of selfish creation; that I found the one thing that I would do if no one gave a flying fuck about my work and that I am, in spite of myself and my learned inner resistance's protestations, doing what I want to do: I am writing a third book.

And then the bad days: there are many of them – more, I think, now, than there had been (but I might be wrong). The days when the blood sugar is out of control, the days when I feel suffocated by this place, by family, by my body, by life, when I lose the capacity to outrun myself, to fight the Happy Meal toy plastic bag over my head from the trash heap – around here, the ditches and culverts of back roads – of this comfort food fantasyland, and submit to its haze of perceived truth: that, ha, writer-boy, you're not a has-been! You're a never-was!

(Reading Wolfe / BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES: so I'm exorcising these exclamation points. Nearly done with it, should be out of my system by this time next week.)

But I know (or I at least tell myself that I do) that the bad days are mostly a product of my opinions, my imagination run amok and wasted on useless things (a better use would be to use that imagination in The Work, wouldn't it?) than of reality – and that the truth is sandwiched somewhere in the middle of these vacillations of myself. And so I type on, because, truthfully, it's the only cure that works these days; I don't know what I'd do with myself if I didn't.