Resurrection

I opened up my still unfinished National Novel Writing month novel last week and actually wrote a few pages in it. And then I did the same thing tonight -- a few more pages of progress actually complete.

Those of you who know me know that this is almost unheard of. And those of you who don't know me, well, now you know that fact too.

It's not so much that I'm not a creative person. I think I'm a highly creative person. The problem is that I get far more excited about the "thinking about being creative" phase than the "actually sitting down and being creative" phase. By the time it comes to actually sitting down, I'm either distracted by liquor or video games. Or both, sometimes.

I know that creating a habit of sitting down and writing a little bit every day just involves, you know, doing it often enough to create a habit. But even knowing it has rarely ever allowed me to pull it off. I try for awhile, then something else gets in the way for a day or two, and then it's bloody hard to get back into it again, so I just let whatever project it was alone for a few months, before guilt finally brings me back.

I enjoy the creating when I create, but I still can't motivate myself to do it.

I'm waiting for an epiphany. A moment of sudden, shocking realization about my own mortality, and how fragile my own life is. With that realization, I think, should come the ability to do all the things I've always wanted to do. Create with complete abandon, knowing I need to get these ideas out now, before I die; quit smoking, because smoking isn't doing anything except shortening my life span; quit drinking so goddamn much, because what's the point of being alive if you're only ever going to see this wonderful, beautiful world through eyes clouded with liquor?

No epiphany as of yet. Clearly. Maybe there will never be one, and I'll simply continue down this path until the day I meet my end and go on to whatever strange and surreal things exist beyond this world.

But if that's the case, I fear that regardless of all the nice things that people might say at my funeral -- because you have no choice but to say nice things at funerals; it's some kind of bylaw -- what they'll all really be thinking is, "He had so much potential. He could have done so much.

"What a sad, sad disappointment his life turned out to be."