Personal Journal

Artificial Happiness is Still Happiness

Artificial Happiness is still happiness.
I’m stoned. I don’t do it very often, and this will be the last time for a long while. Jean is off for a 5-hour trip to Denver, and I am ALONE. I need to speak with Jean about making solid blocks of uninterrupted time for myself. This site has really reconnected me to the side of me that enjoys writing, and reading. I read better, I write better, when I can be locked inside my own solitary world, when my perceptions are limited in what they are allowed to be distracted by. That’s easier to achieve with the drug, but it’s not necessary, just quicker to facilitate.

I’m very myopic, sometimes easily distracted in this state, but it’s good. I’m enjoying a wonderful album, Garbage 2.0. The band is one whose path to success is one from which I draw hope.

The Writing.com site has been pretty successful so far in re-acquainting me with the aspect of my soul that enjoys writing, let’s call it the artist in my soul. I’ve enjoyed reading and writing, and I feel very much like I’m back in one of my old writing workshops from college. When my brain puts me into that mindset, I find I’m far less critical of myself.
It’s interesting – being insecure, having to trick yourself into believing in yourself in some instances. In the past 10 years when I’ve attempted to write, eventually things bog down and I find my work meaningless and poor, so I table it, and there are a half dozen half-started stories lying around this house in various notebooks.

I’ve made it a goal, unspoken except deep inside of me, to avoid other writers’ work, especially fiction, because to see good work would excite within me a resentment of a desire to be a good writer, and the conflict in not exerting any effort to achieve that because I’m lazy (and insecure). So coming back to this, which I have to admit is another somewhat hidden decision within myself to pursue action toward goals, coming back to this I find myself remembering a couple of things.

In as much as seeking external validation is a tool of the insecure, and to be avoided, I remember that when I have put myself in a position to be objectively reviewed by people I esteemed as writers (teachers, quality writing peers in class), my work has been judged praiseworthy… And among people among whom I was deemed a quality writer, my judgment in appraising their works was valued.

Stoner Digression 1: If you read my writing, and hear me speak, you’d never connect the same two people. In writing, something in my voice changes from my interpersonal speech, and I’m a bit too stuffy and English, scientific perhaps, than you’d ever find me in speech. I don’t cuss as much as I used to, and I still do it too often for my tastes, but I’m very much casual, more like my California upbringing.

I was good at this, in the past, and just because these skills have lay fallow, it is probably true that they have not diminished, and only need re-awakened. In just a few days, I’m feeling off balance at times by confronting this submerged conflict that existed for 10 years, but yet better balanced most of the time. I feel a calm about the journey. The real test will come when I put something of a short story out there to be read here, or even try to write one. But at least as an editor I’m not too bad at this; I have found permission to be comfortable reading, and being around other writers. Step 1, success, I suppose.

I do want to write something. Trying to put my finger on it. Fantasy, I think, because the rules are loose. Nothing to revealing of my personality, but just something to have fun with. I had this idea brewing in my head to write my idea down for The Woe Tree, which is an idea from an early 80s band, Krokus, and their one-hit wonder contribution, “Screaming in the Night.” It’s a story of a human teenager and an elf “teen-ager” who become romantic, and the Elf shares glimpses of her culture to the outsider (secretly, as it’s not condoned by Elves to allow outsiders in), and writing an account of Elven justice systems that stand in stark contrast to their light-hearted external presentation. Anyhow, that wouldn’t be too difficult, although like anything I write, I write it long. The last time I tried to write a short story, I got to 7 pages before I gave up on myself, and I wasn’t even to the more than a third of it.

We’ll see. One issue is that it’s pretty difficult to write at work, to write fiction, that is. Fiction, for me, relies on some mental momentum. At work, I have to allow for interruptions (i.e., real work, for which I’m responsible), and those fictional mental moments are easily broken, I think. So I edit there, and write non-fiction. Here at home, well, Jean is here. And as I said, I need to figure out a way…

Yesterday, I bought myself a treat. I bought a recliner/glider chair and ottoman. Jean and I spent the day re-arranging the family room, and I’m really ecstatic about it, it’s just great. And after thinking about it from when I saw it last week, to this weekend, I bought it for the family room by the fireplace (winter is coming!). I plan to use that to write in at times, though certainly I do my best in terms of speed here on the keyboard, I’ve always enjoyed. But having my favorite room to myself for times, to sit with a pen and paper and scribble down stories, might be a good thing as well. It won’t get here till tomorrow, though, but in any case, it’s my birthday present, really. As usual, not something that I’ve earned in my own estimation, but something I hope to, and regardless, something that we will really enjoy as a material thing.

Stoner Digression 2: I love this last song on the Garbage album, “You look so fine,” it has this wonderful line, “You look so fine, I want to break your heart and give you mine.” I’m not good at poetry, and it’s one thing I’m not insecure about. Indeed, my strength is prose, where the direct linked meaning of your words instills the mood. Poetry requires too much to be said outside of the words, and I’m a linear thinker. But sometimes, I find something like that line that makes me wish I were a poet, because it’s one of my favorite art forms (far more in lyrics of music, than straight written poetry; again, a linear thinker finds the music helps carry the meaning, even if self-conceived from the music).

If I could play music from my soul, without a sheet, if I could create, rather than just recite, I would be a musician. Someday I might try anyhow – I think perhaps knowing what I know about myself now, I could take advantage of lessons and learn to do so. In any case, I gave it up, and that skill truly does fall off without practice…
Time to pick a new album…
ta-ta!

It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn