One interesting thing about today, it marks a full year since i started writing a poem every day. Not a serious poem - no epics or anything - just a little fragment of verse for the hell of it. It was supposed to spark a habit of more interesting and varied writing output for me. At the beginning of last year i was feeling really inspired for some reason. I had started The Artist's Way again, i was going out taking photos, i was spending my time creating and learning and enjoying the world around me. Even when everything fell apart and i ended up in hospital, every morning i wrote my pages and at some point during the day i'd scratch out a poem. One day they confiscated my writing implements because i was having a breakdown and stabbing myself... But the next day i played nice so i could keep writing. I think a handful of those poems were even half decent. Later in the year something twisted and i stopped drumming, i stopped boxing, i stopped Spanish... My poems got (even more) banal and irrelevant. I feel like i should have been improving all year and ending on a bang, but instead it became a chore. Should i keep writing crappy poetry this coming year? Why am i still writing my morning pages? I still have my laundromat journal too. And this one. And fuckin... i still can't write. I'm not concise or witty or enlightening.
Something died in me after my teenage years, some crazy flash of creativity. I wrote short stories like you wouldn't believe in high school. I'm sure they were terrible, but i wrote them just the same. I had a whole bunch of ideas. When i was a kid my best friend and i had dreams of becoming sci-fi writers, getting our books published. We imagined amazing worlds. He went on to become an artist, last i heard. I went on to become a computer programmer. Joy. Is it the medication? The hormones? Did i just "grow up"? Where did that side of me go?
Maybe if i spent my time writing with a goal instead of chronicling the endless circling inside of my head like some freakin solipsistic Daytona commentary...
