I’m not inspired by the good. Or even by the great. My inspiration is the mediocre. The crass. My inspiration is the self-satisfaction of knowing (assuming) that I could do a bit better than that. And this is the catalyst which gets me sat at a dining room table that isn’t mine at 4 o’clock on a Friday afternoon, my eyes still revolving in their sockets like a slot machine that never fucking wins, after an entire day of being clamped to my phone, typing feverishly away at my laptop with a vague feeling I’ve got something worth saying. Or at least, something worth hearing.
Mediocrity. It sets the bar at a healthy low level. It doesn’t take much to rise an inch or two above it, or that’s what I tell myself at least. Mediocrity is what gets me started. But finishing is where I come undone.
What does finished even look like? Before the monkey truly got a hold of my mind, it was quite clear what finished was. I’d take out multiple books from the library, start one, finish it, devour the next. I could get through 5 books a week, more even. I craved the escapism, and there wasn’t much else going on. When life itself was young and nothing had really happened yet. Books were my addiction, writing was my addiction, though I always had a love/hate relationship with it. Writing was pushing yourself to have sex when you’re not really in the mood, then it unexpectedly turns out to be great, and you wonder why you don’t do this all the time. Before another two month dry spell.
Now I have 8 books on the go at once, a series of casual, meaningless and unsatisfying encounters, none of which even begin to fill the void in my soul in the way they once did, and truthfully I may never get around to finishing them.
I write scraps of prose, if you can call it that, inane, angry ramblings, I’ll scratch the itch, and then forget about it for another year, another 18 months. And suddenly life itself is not so young anymore. In certain lights, the cracks are showing, the futility of all it’s lived through is weighing heavier on its shoulders and it’s probably time it took up exercise.
Mediocrity. A beginning a middle and an end. Definite themes. Semi-relatable characters.
The alarm wasn’t supposed to go off yet. It was meant to go off at the start, but where better for it to ring its urgent call than in the midst of the middle, when everything is messy, and tired and reluctant and isn’t sure if it wants to go on anymore.
(They’ll either think it’s clever or pretentious. I don’t really care, I just want the money. You’re not meant to say that but there it is)
The alarm’s going off, and I don’t know if it’s now too late for me. They say if you put a frog in water, and slowly heat it to boiling, the frog won’t even notice and will quietly boil itself to death, its alarm deactivated. I had wondered the same of myself, if the alarm was perhaps broken, if I was too used to dysfunction and anger and blaming and chaos for it to ring out. I wasn’t sure I even wanted it to ring, slowly boiling to death probably isn’t the worst way to go.
But I don’t want to go yet.
And the alarm is ringing, although it wasn’t meant to go off yet, it was meant to wait at least until we’d got through therapy, and you’d quit your job,at least until after Christmas and until it’s been over a year since your dad’s death. But the alarm is ringing, and I realise now it really has been ringing for a long time, I was just too busy, skimming the pages without taking it in, finding ways of sinking deeper into my hot bath of discomfort to realise the discomfort had become excruciating pain.
And the only way I have to finally put a stop to this, is as I crawl into bed next to you, squeeze your hand in mine, and say..
I can’t do this anymore
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