Naked unfamous

The following was originally called "Day 1" and was actually written sometime last year, when I was trying to kick my own arse and get into writing once more. I never did anything with this, it was basically a stream of consciousness exercise. Me thrashing out my reason for wanting to try writing once more. It turned out to be a fair bit more than that and I never put it up anywhere. Well, here it is!

My will to write is always superseded by my inability to commit to writing. I can’t even come close to forming a coherent body of work when I can’t settle on a subject area for more than a few minutes. Too many ideas, too little time, and too many things holding me back from properly pursuing what might be my last chance at greatness.

That’s what I’m banking on, of course. The possibility that this avenue that I previously overlooked, then investigated, then ran away from because it all seemed like to much boring hard work, might actually be the right direction for me. It’s also entirely possible that it might not be. For years my parents led me to believe I was smart, encouraged me to talk smart, act smart, but was I truly smart?

It seems like as soon as the outside influences got into my head, a lot of that behaviour and supposed intelligence faded or transformed into something entirely new. I was introduced to normality, to laziness, and to fun. My yearning for sex, which had begun at an extremely early age, was finally in a position to be fulfilled, and this would overtake my desire to do most things that were not essential to living.

I relied primarily on natural ability and charm AKA bullshitting to fudge my way through secondary education, on into university, where it finally occurred to me that I was going to have to do some work. I responded to this revelation by dropping out, and pursuing a far easier avenue that I thought would be a quicker root to earning reputation, credibility, and possibly even notoriety. One advanced diploma later I landed a job so thoroughly detached from any creative aspect of the music industry, that I found myself cursing the day I ever decided to ‘pursue my dream’.

Let’s face it; I don’t have an ultimate goal, other than to be known. I want to make an impact, and I really don’t care how I do it. Monetary benefits are preferable, but fuck, if I could be regarded amongst any credible group of people with respect and admiration, I’d feel like I’d achieved a hell of a lot. In fact, maybe even forget the word credible, I’ll settle for any large group of people. Is this just a basic working/middle class fantasy? Am I no better than the pimply-faced chubby idol contestants who are shocked and upset to find out they didn’t make the cut? Who am I to presume I have any right to be anything more than what I am right now?

I’m 23, and all over the world there are people my age establishing themselves as major players in whatever field they were wise enough to pursue with all their hearts as quickly as they could. It was always expected that I would be one of those people, but here I am contemplating a complete reversion and almost repentance if you will. I’m ready to confess my sins against creativity, and strive for a more innovative mode of expression, free from mediocrity and cliché. Part of what motivates me is shame; Shame that my creative output thus far fails to appeal to the upper echelon of artists, musicians, writers, scholars, and other arseholes with opinions.

That’s a hard thing to admit, that on one level I am so proud of what I’ve achieved, and on another I’m quite ashamed that I haven’t achieved more. I know I can’t impress everybody, but right now I wonder if I’m just impressing all the wrong sorts of people. As long as I can remember I’ve wanted to be cool, hip, or whatever other obscenely overused term you can think of, and for about as long, I’ve always felt it was just out of my reach. I’m fairly certain that devoting my time to writing is not the best way to finally achieve that goal, but maybe it will help me feel like I’m getting closer to my own idea of what it is to be cool.

I wish I didn’t always see two sides to everything, because every time I write a sentence with the word 'maybe' in it, I instantly think of the 'maybe not' that should come after it. I guess it’s realism with a dash of mother’s pessimism. That she would call realism. So who really knows? This is the first full page of writing I have written for no ones benefit but my own in years, and it feels okay.