Getting to Know You

I think I used to write more because I had fewer distractions. It's only when I am done with the video games, done with Twitter, done with Facebook, done with email, done with whatever breathing thing is in the room, that I find myself turning inevitably toward a keyboard. Confronted with nothing, I create. Not to get too Pascal, but I don't think the nothing has changed since I last looked at it. It's always going to be there. It won't get bigger. It won't get smaller. I will just have more or fewer things in my line of sight to block it out sometimes than others. I guess it gets closer. It's always at my time-richest that words come back to my hands. Not having the luxury of immediacy makes for long days. When I do write, it tends to be taken for what it is: existential dread vocalized for yet another new modern era of darkness. I don't know what kind of value it adds to anyone's life, but I seemed to make a few friends who seemed to sympathize with it before drifting away as the years yawned further. I've gotten older. When I was younger, everything happened. It was all there and accessible and part of the narrative, so it was easy to keep it all straight. No plot holes. No lost threads. Tight narrative and gripping drama. But I stopped writing when I got busy. Somewhere between then and now, all of five years between my lowest and my highest point, a lot of things happened that I couldn't pull together anymore. It was like they happened in another lifetime to another character in a spinoff. The canon was a muddled mess because the editors all went out for drinks after the first act and phoned in the second. So the question is, why didn't they tell us? They had to notice. This kind of thing happens without you seeing it but you can't go your whole life without realizing that you eventually lived too long for your brain to figure out who you are anymore. Can you? Did our parents, our teachers, our mentors, our gurus all just decide that it was too dank? Too wretched to tell the youngsters that, "Hey, you know something, I've lived like five of your lifetimes. I have been five times as many people as you are. I have actually forgotten more than you can possibly remember, and it terrifies me."? I used to think it was the alcohol that was making me slip a bit. A few too many nights out blasting brain cells while trying to punish my liver for its (probably) many many sins were probably why it didn't feel quite all like a coherent whole anymore. But then I met more and more old people - they were in short supply in my life, it's an unpleasant story. They drank, or they didn't. They never said it, but I never met one who wasn't doing what I would be doing in their shoes now that I think about it. The secret might well be this. Fifty year old me isn't going to be much different from thirty year old me. I think the reason why is I finally have enough memories that I can pick and choose from what's there to fit the narrative I decide on. I'm no longer constrained by the tyranny of facts and causality preventing me from saying, "Yes, I am a good person." or "I'm an iconoclast." or "I did it my way" or "fuck I am god damned tired of all this shit and let's get a drink already."