#215

Opened up Microsoft word and chose the font. Went with Cambria Math in fourteen-point. When I first started writing I thought to write straight into Times New Roman, twelve-point font, but that's better for proofing. Still dip back into it pretty often, it's not bad at all. It reminds you what you're doing, which is nice.

Pretty quickly I switched to Courier in ten-point. I would still use that for some stuff. I do not like Courier New. I quit using Courier when I began to feel that I had mastered my old typewriter, which I threw in the garbage in a fit of ego-destroying, memory-driven madness as I gruesomely extracted myself from a narcissist. I had stopped using Courier and its bastard before that, but more recently than I might care to admit maybe. Two and a half years ago. 

This is really basic font-talk, I'm boring the shit out of myself, and the reason I am writing here instead of in the word document I opened is of course that despite my bravado, I am terrified to begin. Hilarious. 

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Started banging out stories with a purpose at the age of eleven. My fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Bates, made us, called 'em Super Subjects. Just little freewriting exercises. Ole girl knew what she was doing; I was a discipline issue when she took over halfway through the year, and before long mostly all I thought about was how to impress her with my writing. She was fucking tough, see. I sweated over the book reports she assigned and crumpled up I don't know how much good paper getting a paragraph just right. 

Get 'em while their ego is as enormous as only a child's can be, before too much self-consciousness has set in but the process is in motion. I actually hungered to read my work in front of the class. Immigrant boy, best writer in the class. Yeah I fucking liked that. I was, too. Ms. Bates didn't talk to anyone about their writing like she talked to me, not even to KdB., who was and remains to this day fifty times smarter than me. An essay I had to write for D.A.R.E. about why I would never do drugs was selected as the best by the program people and I was put up on stage in the auditorium to read it aloud in front of all the fifth-grade classes. That this should have been my first professional success is perhaps a damning mark over my career; I'm stoned right now and also am a fucking alcoholic.

Hell, I knew when I was filling out those D.A.R.E. worksheets that I was putting on an act for these people. I could feel already that I was fucked up. I remember consciously and cynically putting a tremble into my hand when I filled in some bullshit about how I didn't want to drink because blah-blah-blah and I've seen what drink does to my uncle. More on him another day, there's always good stories around a drunk*. I would be stealing nips from the fine tequila my dad had a bottle of in the freezer right after I got home from school within two years of reading that essay in front of a bunch of beaming cops and teachers. 

"So far above his grade level!" 

lol

Anyway, the problem with writing is it can get out of your hands, become bigger than you, drive you around. When you're a kid it's just something you do, even if it's something you are; it feels more like a choice even though it's really unchaining a drive which, when liberated, will perversely never let you go. No matter what goes wrong, no matter the severity of the ego death or the blindness of drink, you just fucking keep writing. Mostly just to see it burn.

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So, beginnings are hard, maybe even triggering. That's why I wrote this blog post instead of a single sentence. But it's loosened me up, see? I'm not as nervy as when I sat down. I got a rhythm going and I'm not done with the good good fucking great-ass feeling of punching keys. So I'm gonna try again. Forget all the important work I lost; get hard and go. Writing is Ironborn: what is dead may never die, but rises again, harder and stronger. Words are wind, and everything is built on the wind.**

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Ready to start again. 


--JL

*I cannot help but notice, dear reader, that the most hit-upon posts on FP are usually the ones which rely on what I have called the sordid tonal qualities of cigarettes and alcohol. I see you motherfuckers. Well, so be it; I'm finna bring some drinkin stories out this fall for sure. Maybe even tomorrow.

**profound thanks to George R.R. Martin, who is a greater writer than he is taken for; I am aware that the man has risen high, but I stand by my statement. Like Stephen King, he is so fucking rad that to call him merely a great writer is to mildly insult him. The dudes are writer's writers and reader's writers in a way that will outlast much around us that will soon be deservedly forgotten. Speaking in a literary sense. They are at the center of letters and as universally despised as they are popular and beloved for a host of good, bad, simple, and complex reasons.