Dedicated, Highly Motivated

Fighting sleep.

I struggle with the sandman as if its a WWF fight. I am tired. Very tired. I find my head bobbing heavily. I can't keep my eyes open no matter how hard I struggle. I get a second wind, my eyes pop, a coolness passes over my forehead and mouth. I am suddenly wide awake, so I begin on my process anew, writing down my thoughts. Only to instantly find my thoughts drifting, and since I can type without even looking at the keyboard, nonsensical sentences appear on the electronic page.

From this conscious freefall I right myself. Jarring myself from this half dream state. I'm a punch drunk fighter, staggering on his feet, arms up weakly, head slightly bowed, eyelids lowered. I am fucked up. No amount of coffee seems to shake this power, this hold that sleep has on my mind.

My mind, which is caught like a wheel without oil. I am struggling to write.

This to you might sound infantile, but this is the core of my very being. I must write. I remember reading how Jack London promised to write a thousand words a day, every day, to stay atop of his game. I promised myself to write a poem for ten minutes a day. Hah! Very dutiful if you ask me. But that shit is hard. Plus, I might be up there near a thousand words a day. I don't count them, although I could. But the amount of shit that I write is prodigious. I have my blog and my screenplay to thank for that. Plus I do count emails in with this figure. Anytime that I'm striking the keys of a keyboard is part of the word count.

To take it easy on my laptop keyboard I've bought an external USB keyboard, so now I can pound the fuck out of it without feeling the guilt of harming my baby. And I pound on it alright. I pound on it like its attached to my dick and I'm beating it like it owes me money. EVERYDAY, EVERY HOUR, damn near every minute. And people wonder how I can type so fucking fast. BECAUSE I'M DEDICATED and highly motivated.

I'm going to do this, and to this well. I have no excuse to be fucking around. I have no respon- sibilities, few needs, fewer pos- sessions. Writing is my full time job, and if I can, I need to make up for my handicaps. Those such as the lack of a formal education, a college degree, pedicure or fame. Sheer luck will not come to my rescue. I've chosen this hard road since I hit the streets. And it's just beginning folks.

The road WAS hard. It was a long hard road out of the Hell that was alcoholism. Or, more accurately for those who like to clump everything up into a singular word: Alcoholism. It was a long road from alcohol dependency. Where you could not function through your day without a hit, or twenty. Much like much of the free world uses valium. A road strewn with numerous failures and numerous broken bones and teeth. But after crawling over miles of busted glass I emerged out the other side, now wishing not to turn back to a life that I so scrupulously pieced together, in an attempt to depend on in my later years.

Now I wish for a new life. And to achieve it, it will take dedication the likes none have seen before. I need to pay my dues, and pay them in spades. I have to get to writing, and nothing on this Earth must be allowed to stand in my way. And thats why this sleepiness is a mockery of me. Because it is me that is now standing before progress. Now I have to start blaming me. But maybe it was and will be me all along. Have you ever thought of that?

In an article WRITERS AND ALCOHOL, by Ann Waldron in a special to The Washington Post, she writes: "Writers do behave oddly. They can be monomaniacal about their work, obsessional about rewriting, insecure about any success they might have, paranoid about editors and publishers, riddled with anxiety about their talent. They are often nonconformists." - March 14, 1989, pp. 13-15.

I'll be goddamned if I don't feel all of that shit. Ms. Waldron makes some good points about alcohol and the American Writer also. She has done her research well in my book. She says basically that the Writer himself or herself is the source of his/her pain, and that this pain may be the source of his/her creativity. And alcohol somehow plays into it.

Don't ask me, all I know is that I'm in good company. There are a lot of writers that are familiar with the Brown World. I'm not the exception. And if I were, what could I do about it? Nothing really.

I nod again. Sleep continues it's inexorable struggle against me. It knows that it will win in the long run and that I will give in simply because anything that I set my mind to today will come crashing down around my head until I do get some sleep.

It is an inevitability.

But I'm putting in my thousand words before then. You bet your ass I am.

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