a place for everything

Jun 24, 2007 08:32


UC Berkeley has the world's premiere collection on Mark Twain - and Yale an unmatched trove of rare medieval manuscripts. But for research on Capt. Kirk, Frankenstein or Harry Potter, nothing tops the 110,000-volume Eaton collection at UC Riverside, the world's largest library of science fiction, fantasy and horror books ( Read more... )

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Impromptu. leondacter June 25 2007, 07:59:45 UTC
Delaney and Philip K. Dick have always fascinated and enthralled me. I've read all of Dick's fiction currently in print (mostly by Vintage), and several of Delaney's, but I want to explore Delaney more. I've read Absolom, Absolom! and Suttree recently, but I'm completely unsatisfied with my reading right now. I have no time, and even less ability to enjoy reading anymore. I read crap on Live Journal as a distraction, because I can view it from work and carry out broken, unfocussed, and styptic conversations on it. It's a shitty consolation.

I feel like my life is oozing slowly down the barrel of a gun right now, and I can do little to stop it without horribly backfiring. I have to make it to November, and then, hopefully, my hard work will start to amount to something. I'm depressed, though, already, and it's just approaching July. My life is actually going quite well, but I'm breathtakingly morose and feel like stagnant water full of slime-rotten stems that both drink me away and pollute what's left of me. I'm a selfish man, and I have always spoiled myself as a writer, I'm coming to realize. If this is all the adversity I have to face, it isn't much, really, and I'm doing quite well, as I've said before. So I guess it comes down to what means the most to me, my metaphysical tension in the short term, or my physical health (in the short term) and metaphysical health (projected, in the long term)? I'm just being a whiny baby. Living this way, though, is so fucking unnatural for me. I haven't seen a movie I really wanted to see in six months. I haven't had time to compose anything in the last six moths that makes me feel at all worthwhile, and I realize the weird sort of narcissism involved in writing, for me. I feel hollow, and a feeble wind eeks through my form as I move around at work. I told my boss I was depressed, and he asked why. I explained it to him, how I'm working all day, and just have enough time to sleep at night before I get up and go to the next job. How I'm consumed by working so much and my desire to write nags at me like nothing else can, how that nag makes me resent daily chores around the house that, left undone, cause serious strife with the girl I'm living with (who also works incredibly hard), and how it all leads me to this utterly hopeless, depressed state of being wherein I can not be angry, sad, or otherwise emotional without serious consequence (upsetting the precarious balance of my entire world right now). He told me I was a good person, and then said, Let me know if there's anything I can do to help.

I also work with this girl named Jillian Murray, and she keeps asking me about various things I'm writing. The other day she heard how my work schedule currently runs, and she said, When do you ever find time to write? I don't, I said. I have to make it to November, I told her, then I can refocus myself. I'm biding my time and my soul until November (I didn't say that to her).

I have six pages of a new script, and fifty some of a pilot that I need to retool and rethink. I can't work well on either, because I can't focus myself long enough to accomplish anything worthwhile. Live Journal is a shitty, shitty consolation, and I'm writing here now because my day has been spent on things that are, once again, not literature, and not half-creative. I feel I have lived all my life in veiled solopsism. I'm not suffering the pangs of domestication well at all, and I think I may make it just up to November, just long enough to shoot myself on my birthday. That would be quite circular, or at least radially symmetrical (suggesting a loop, like Twain and Haley's Comet), but not like Dhalgren is.

It's sad that when it comes down to my desperate time, I turn at random to the person first on my friends list and clack out a confession. It's non-confrontational, and so another point of cowardice for me, but I don't know who to speak to. I think I need to seek a therapist, but that's only more of my time (and money) spent not doing what I want to do, which is write.

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