The ants crawled about the floor, in the sink, along the shower wall. They crawled inside his skull, tearing at his thoughts. Words fell from his open mouth in tatters. Conflicting voices, an out of tune radio too quiet to hear, just loud enough to drive him to distraction, to hold head in hands. He stared at the ceiling at night, listening to the sound of his own body hitch and heave.

“Make it stop,” he whispered. Does the elevator just drop and keep on dropping, forever in free-fall?

Oh my god. It’s all falling away.

Oh my god.

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Looking back, she must have seen me as a man just barely holding on.

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I’ve fallen behind, I admit it. So much going on with life, love, and the business of writing that I have left myself precious little time or will to sit down and write. I’m exhausted after weeks of surprisingly high stress levels, yet I’m very much looking forward to writing a few short stories. You’ll excuse me if I get back to it. More soon, pinkie swear. (?!)

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What can I say? The Replacements remain a great band for me to dream to. A more bittersweet optimism, I suppose.

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“They’re probably not so fond of you, either.”

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I may have a severe learning disability, or maybe I’m simply inept. Maybe I just don’t know how to use my hands. That would explain why I’m such a shitty guitar player, or why the backspace key is worn out on my keyboard. My hands don’t work. Things that people say are “easy”, I find to be extremely frustrating, time consuming, and monetarily draining. Usually after I start the project, I realize that I could have saved myself a lot of aggravation by just paying someone else to do it for me.

I also wouldn’t end up playing field medic, spending my Saturday evening bandaging self-inflicted puncture wounds and lacerations. I don’t know why every project I undertake requires my blood being given up like a sacrifice to the fucking artistic gods, but I’m pretty tired of it. My blood is mixed into the grout on my bathroom floor, smeared across the vinyl siding,. I couldn’t move my hand for a week after an accident re-shingling the roof. I splashed motor oil into my eyes while changing my car’s fluids. Now, my blood is smeared across my mat boards. I should have just paid the frame shop to mount my work for me, as then the artwork wouldn’t look like an epileptic chimp with an X-acto blade got into the paper supply.

People wonder why I spend so much time worrying about “learning how to do something”, and why I feel that I’m not fit for doing things other than working at a shitty, ingrate-infested record store. I think it’s because I need the practice run on everything I do, so I don’t pummel my body into submission doing something I’ve never done before. After all, they make you take a god-damned driving test before you get your license, right? By these standards, people would have just told me, “Driving is easy!” and let me get behind the wheel of the car, barreling over hapless pedestrians before losing control and careening off a cliff. There’s a reason society has Driver’s Ed, and that reason is me.

There’s a good chance that I settled on writing as a career choice because there really not a lot of ways for me to physically hurt myself while doing it. I suppose if I had one of those old typewriters, the spinning ball would shoot off and nail me in the eye or something, but barring my monitor exploding into a fireball of shattered glass, I think I’ll be okay.  The biggest dangers facing me in this venture are eye strain, carpal tunnel, and fabulously bad posture. (Though I’m ignoring alcohol, cocaine, and shotgun abuse, but whatever.)

From now on, please remember this:  If I say I don’t know how to do something, it’s because I HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT I’M DOING.  We all know how it will end.  I will be furious and cursing my mother’s womb, and you will think I’m crazy and in need of emotional counseling.  Spare me, you, all of us the torment.  Tackle me, taser me, slip me some horse tranquilizers – I don’t care what you have to do – just take whatever hammer, nail gun, razor, paint brush, grout float, hacksaw, cutting torch, surgeon’s scalpel out of my hands!  Don’t let me touch it!  We don’t let tigers go water skiing!  You never see a gorilla riding a humpback whale into the sunset!  It’s not the natural order of things! 

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Pavement is having a reunion tour, courtesy of Pitchfork. While it’s all sorts of unbecoming for a gentleman to squeal with joy, I think I might have to succumb. It’s either that or wet myself.

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A few weeks back, Devon Polderman dropped me a line regarding the whirling shit-storm of words that is “Analeigh VS. The Beam”, a story that I’d started a year before even enrolling in his class. He had been a fan of the story, something that confused me, as on one hand, I’d written something that had been carried from one class to another, always evolving form and shape, and somehow managing to “work”. On the other hand, “Analeigh” had turned from a one-note joke about a girl in a leather catsuit into a melancholy story about love, loss, and the idiotic things that people do when they refuse to let go of the past… and a girl in a leather catsuit. However, words like “despondent” and “morose” don’t come close to describing my personal state during the time period in which I’d begun the story, and as such, I really dislike writing about Analeigh, Holly, Cooper, and their big stupid love triangle. Returning to that story is like diving into a pool filled with rubbing alcohol.

That being said, I was thrilled when Devon emailed me with the news that the Fiction Writing Department was sorting through student work chosen by the Instructors themselves, with the selected pieces being sent to visiting writers, editors, and agents during Columbia College Chicago’s annual Story Week. From there, these industry professionals would go over the pieces and provide personal feedback, a critique that struggling writer-folk like myself cannot put a price tag upon. “No need for a massive rewrite, either,” he wrote in the email, “(though I’m assuming you’ve been working on it); mainly, I just need a clean copy, as self-contained as possible, at about 20 pages.”

As explained above, I hadn’t been working on it, a fact made even funnier by Devon’s next sentence: “And, I would need this by early next week.” It was Saturday when I read this, having gotten home from my shift at the wine bar and going straight to bed. And then I worked two more shifts at the bar, too tired at night and too scatted in the morning to write. Or at least I told myself that, as I did everything in my power to avoid getting Devon’s pages together. I finally fired the story off into the internet at 4 o’clock Wednesday morning, a time in the week that seems far closer to the middle than to the begging, but whatever — Devon got his story. Well, two stories, as the next morning I spotted three errors in the first paragraph alone and panicked, scrambling to get a newly-edited copy together. (That’s the joy of writing — I can read something eight hundred times and see no problem at all, but as soon as I hit “Send” I see six similes in consecutive sentences.)

Anyway, this week Columbia let me know that “Analeigh VS The Beam” had made the cut, one of only twenty-five pieces selected. The department has something like seven hundred students enrolled, so I’d say I did pretty well. The selection entitles me to a meeting with one of the visiting industry professionals. I lucked out with Michelle Brower, literary agent with Folio Literary Management.

You could say that I’m just a tad excited about this.

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Because it’s been that kind of week.

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