It's probably a good thing that I slept through my seminar this morning -_- This is the best I could come up with last night (my excuse is that the task was to write a stream of consciousness)
Something in a Haystack Somewhere.
Words block somewhere between I don’t know where and somewhere else. I can feel them building like mucus – inaccessibly there, infuriatingly present and completely, wholly untouchable. I have writers’ flu and I am desperate to sneeze, although I dread to think what nauseating nonsense might be unleashed once I do. I wonder what the literary equivalent to a handkerchief is?
I have overexposed myself to consciousness and awareness and that drive that gets you nowhere – pneumonia has struck and now I have a headache. Rest and relaxation – it’s hilarious how simple the cure is (potentially) and how entirely impossible it is to acquire. One hundred words and I am forcing myself onwards, each step another chilblain as I fight through the dense mire of letters, past a thicket of words and into a vine-ridden jungle of sentences. There is no clearing and I can only hack and hack and hack to keep myself afloat – letting go means drowning in an endless sea of self-hatred and frustration. Even metaphors and clichés are more bearable than that, even if they do snap at your fingers as you grasp for them – any lifeline is better than none.
Sometimes.
When time is running out and the pressure is weighing down, certainly.
Don’t stop – stopping is the worst way backwards. Stopping means screaming in the hope that sound is better than silence. Stopping means tearing at anything within reach – hair, paper, skin, fabric – anything anything to be – to feel – at least marginally productive.
You would go on forever if it were possible; the thought of the end, and the unsatisfying silence that will greet you, is intolerable. But, perhaps, that is because it is not yet the end and the only the end of one part of one leg of one journey and there will be countless more battles that you are bound to lose, but you will always do your best even though you know – you know – that you can do better, but when it comes down to it what actually matters? What they know, or what you know? Whose opinion – in the grand scheme of things – matters? And does that even matter in itself? It isn’t about that, and you know it don’t try to trick me it doesn’t work don’t make excuses, just buckle down and get on with it, just as you are doing, just because somehow the gods are smiling in your favour and so it was decreed that thou shalt jabber on meaninglessly although knowing your luck and yourself as you do – and you’re fairly sure you do, because if you don’t who else can? But you can never be a hundred-percent about anything, no these days – you will hack your way so far through whatever it is you are hacking at and come out of the other side, blinking in the day light and go,
“Oh. Fuck. I left the point behind.”
And then it will be like finding a needle in a haystack – and entirely useless that will demotivate you and sap you of energy and confidence and motivation to do anything but…Not but. The but is obsolete.
Whether you go back or not, you will have neither needle nor point, and what is there to do here except shove your hands into your pockets and whistle a happy tune? You can’t even whistle.
The fates, it seems, have already decided for you.
At least the responsibility is not in your hands.
You’d only drop it.