4/30/10

The words you’re reading now mark another futile attempt at substance; words on a page arranged in a way that’s meaningful, insightful and entertaining. At this point, I’d settle for coherent, legible and grammatically correct. I’ve slammed the laptop lid shut in bitter frustration more times than I can count, leaving half-finished thoughts, clichéd sentiments and pseudo-philosophies to linger and languish in literary limbo. Do I sit patiently, like an old man at a dive-diner counter, taking long drags off Marlboro reds and taking slow, deliberate sips from his coffee mug, assuming the demeanor of a man with plenty to say but no one to say it to? No, I do not. Instead, I assume the persona of an over-caffeinated, sleep-deprived college student, pacing the room and fraying the edges of his sanity while trying to meet the deadline of some research paper long put off. Since when did writing start to feel like a job? Probably since the words stopped coming easily. I don’t know exactly when that was. It’s not writer’s block; it’s writer’s blockade – the ships that carry my thoughts can’t sail, and I’m doomed to stare at a blinding white sea of dead, white space… the enemy cursor mocking me with its incessant blinking. It’s daring me to write, because it knows that I can’t.

Maybe it’s just stress – there’s too much going on. Between work, the impending move back to NY, finding a new job, financial worries and an overall apathy toward my life the likes of which I’ve never felt, who has time to write? Except writing used to be my release – it was the drug that centered me, mellowed me, balanced me out. I want that relationship with writing again. Come on back to me, baby. I know I’ve been difficult to be around – I know it seems like I’ve changed – but you’ve got to believe me – I’m still the same guy. Aren’t I? Maybe not. Maybe that’s the problem.

After I graduated college, I kept an online journal. In it was some of the best writing I’ve ever done. At least, I think it was. I can’t know for sure, because I deleted the thing shortly after I moved to Florida. Fitting, really. One snap decision followed by another, neither of which really worked out the way I’d assumed they would. Inside This Darkened Heart (the title of my online journal) were the wide-open ramblings of a twenty-two year old post-grad who had just had the safety net yanked out from under him and face-planted directly into reality. For almost three years, I wrote in that thing with reckless abandon. I shared private thoughts with perfect strangers, stated opinions about ex-girlfriends, confessed to mistakes, poor choices and personal short-comings. The guy who wrote in This Darkened Heart had a voice: he was honest, scared, and confused. He was optimistic, yet somehow cynical. He was a violent thinker and a deep drinker. Self-critical to a painful extent, that guy wore his heart on his sleeve, and he ironed, hot-glued and stapled it to make sure that it stayed there. He was corny, clever, earnest, melodramatic, prolific and hokey almost all at once. He was a character, and I mean that in the literal sense. I wrote in the voice of a persona that I created – an offshoot of me, only amplified. He could comment on my life with an honesty that I myself could never match. He was Sal Paradise to Jack Kerouac; Fredrick Henry to Hemingway, though not nearly as talented as either. He was the Hank to my Charlie Bailey-Gates (see Me, Myself & Irene); a boozed up, hyperbolic extension of my psyche. And you know what? I fucking loved him. So what happened? I didn’t know, until just recently, when it came to me like the obvious answer to the simplest question… you know, the one that resides permanently on the tip of your tongue, waiting to be spoken. It appeared like Dirk Diggler’s name – in trashy neon porno lights: I got older.

I turned twenty-nine a few weeks ago. Now, I’m not saying that I woke from a dead sleep when the clock struck twelve on April 8^th and screamed, “Oh my god, I’ve outgrown my voice!” That’s not the way it went down. Rather, it dawned on me when I was sitting on my friend Dani’s patio with our friend Shannon, drinking a few beers and enjoying what was most likely the last cool evening I’ll ever experience in Florida. I leaned back on the patio chair and stared off over the black silhouettes of the palms backlit by the waning layer of blazing amber just above the horizon (I hate this fucking state, but damned if it isn’t pretty sometimes), and I traded stories with Shannon while she sipped her glass of wine. She’s a couple years older than me, and we are on the same page when it comes to a lot of things. We joked self-deprecatingly about early bedtimes, Friday nights spent nodding off to bad movies while our younger selves were still doing keg stands and howling at the moon in some parallel universe, and how neither of us can keep up with our friend Dani, who habitually closes down the bar. We laughed and embraced our lameness, and I suddenly felt this weird detachment from my former self. I’ve know for a while that I’m no longer the twenty-two year old version of myself, let alone the nineteen year old version who, hammered out of his skull, surfed on his friend Matty’s car down Northern Blvd. (sorry, Mom.) That guy is long gone, and like I said, I’ve been aware of that for some time. However, what recently occurred to me is that I can no longer write in his voice. That character who fancied himself a trainwreck- because he was still young enough to wear that hat and make it look cool – can no longer speak for the man who types these very words. That guy’s a ghost. He’s a tongueless skull in the graveyard of youth. Alas, poor RyanOReily*… I knew him well.

*RyanOReily was my pseudonym at the time.

So now the question is, “what does my new voice sound like?” Scratch that. That’s not the question. This Darkened Heart was a completely organic creation. I wrote what I felt, and I got into a groove. My writing voice was born out of that. It wasn’t created deliberately; it happened and I ran with it. So I guess what it comes down to is that I just need to keep writing, as earnestly as I possibly can, and hopefully, I’ll find my voice again. I know it’s there – it’s just dormant. It will take some time. But you know what? It’s 12:40 a.m. My alarm goes off in a little over four hours. The witching hour is when I used to shine putting words on a page, and here I am, about to post the first complete, somewhat-focused piece of writing that I’ve done in months. And that feels pretty fucking good.