I work at a bookstore in downtown Tulsa. It is objectively a very cool spot and no doubt the place that I would take people to when they visited. I actually visited the first night I came to Tulsa. I thought then that if I ever lived in a place like this, I would want to work at a spot like that.
And now I work there. And that's cool.
I am not there much. I get about 10 hours a week. And the pay is meager. But I always enjoy being there. It's such a good, warm feeling place.
And being that it is the only job that my anxiety has allowed me to keep these last two years, I am grateful for it. I need more work desperately, but that's neither here nor there right now.
Tonight we had an author event (something we do fairly regularly. John Waters is coming in May!). The event tonight was for a book called "Before and After the Book Deal" (by Courtney Maum, if you're interested).
And there's something about events like that. I don't know. I always felt the same way when I worked at the Contemporary Art Museum in Denver. Maybe there's something about being around people who are successful at the thing that you are still striving (and failing) to do. Something about just how casual they are with all of it. How they reek of good grooming and functionality.
It always makes me feel petty and small and bitter.
I pour coffee for C-list celebrities and feel like that's somehow all I am. Just a guy pouring coffee.
And in a certain, very real sense, that is all I am. That is, that is all that I am presently doing with my life. That is all that I have on paper to show anyone.
I mean I have a rich interior life (though plagued of late with all sorts of neurosis monsters) and am eagerly studious at cunnilingus, but neither of those things will make for a good eulogy. At least not necessarily.
Events like the one tonight also bring in what I would argue is far worse than the flippantly successful: the nakedly ambitious. All of these hopeful MFA candidates, story writers, poets, clambering in and taking notes. Asking about what kind of agent to get and so many other questions that would seem to assume their success.
And I hate them. I hate all of them. I want to tell them that they are foolish. That there a million people already writing whatever insipid story that you are hacking away at. That they'll never get noticed in the vast ocean of submitted manuscripts.
I hate them because I am them. They remind me just how far away my dreams actually are.
Then, of course, there was the lecture itself. Where all of us dreamers were told the truth of just how much of a battle we are facing. How very difficult all of this. How you need tough skin and to get used to rejection.
But my skin is as soft as an infants. I am hypersensitive and so goddamn insecure.
What the fuck am I doing?
Why couldn't I want to be doing something else, anything else with my life?
What is it that I want anyway?
It's not fame, exactly.
And it's not just to write for the sake of writing. I mean hell, if that's all it is, I've been writing in this blog since 2003. I should be happy as a clam.
I was just about to write that I just want to matter. To be important to someone.
But I also already have that. Maybe not in the way where that really feels true, but that's a problem with my noggin, not reality.
And there are sure easier ways to become important than writing a book. I always look at our clearance cart with melancholy. Here was someone's heart and soul, something they put years of their life into, and we are selling it for 60% off.
Still, I choose to write. It's not even particularly a choice. It's something I have to do. Something that burns in my blood.
I write to stay alive.
If I am a failure than I shall be a failure.
I've just grown frustrated at my tendency to call myself a failure before I've even tried.
I want to stop doing that.
I'm not really sure how.
9:23 p.m. - 2020-03-03
Recent entries:
Anxiety is a real motherfucker - 2020-05-03
A Good Deal of Emotional Vomit - 2020-04-15
Word constipation - 2020-04-11
Sleepless Thoughts (and thoughts, and thoughts) - 2020-03-27
Pandemic - 2020-03-24
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