It’s a Mental State

You cannot believe the neurotic depths I fall into when I try to write fiction. This evening, I thought I could get started on this idea I have for a short novel (or a lengthy chapter in the magnum opus I can’t bring myself to write). I paced around the house for a bit, and kept not sitting down at the table to write. A good friend called, and we talked about these hesitations of mine. An artist himself, he feels great sympathy for me, and has faith that I’ll get rolling sometime.

It causes such dread in me, this fear of committing to one set of words instead of another. Maybe it’s the perils of working with a bunch of talented authors, and not wanting to write beneath them. Which is dumb, I know, but might still be my operating principle.

The funny thing was, after an hour of this melodrama, avoiding the screen, showering to clear my head, dressing in nice clothes to break the routine slack-attire of an evening at home, typing in a line here or there, I sat back on my fainting couch and found myself reconsidering one of the most pretentious things I ever wrote, back in college. In that instant, I marveled over how little I’ve changed in that time, and how I could’ve failed to grow in any meaningful way.

And then I thought I could make a pretty funny/pathetic blog entry out of that. And a bunch of the words and phrases just fell into position. So I got up, closed the five lines of Word (“Was he a missile with no target, or one with no warhead? Aimless or powerless?” to give you an idea of how over-wrought I was getting), and started writing this.

It’s much easier for me to write these little journals, even though the voices in which I write may be as fictitious as the characters I keep failing to work on. I do need to get back to more essayistic entries, but this’ll have to suffice for the nonce.

The promised second part of Escape from New York isn’t really much. Adam and I got home, and the power was still dead. Being a swinging bachelor (well, when I’m wearing boxers, at least), I have a bunch of candles around. So we lit those, sat in the living room, and shot the breeze for a while. Around 8:30pm, my father called, with the news that he’d gotten power back, about 10 miles from my house.

Adam drank my beer, ostensibly to save them from skunking. I’m not a big home-drinker, and I’m not a beer guy at all anymore, since I discovered the virtues of gin & tonic, so the three beers that were in the fridge were likely from 6-8 weeks ago, when my buddy Jon-Eric and I spent a rainy Saturday afternoon at my house, watching Blade Runner and getting wrecked.

Around 9:30pm, my old girlfriend (and one of two non-family members who calls on my birthday) in Massachusetts called to check on me. Her region had no power problems. I filled her in on the zombie plague, and the rats that were fleeing the city, and she laughed. In the middle of the conversation, my electricity came back, and I shouted, “I got power now, bitch! Fuck you!” She laughed again. I told her that I love her and got off the phone. Having friends is a good thing.

Adam was happy that we could now turn on the TV and see what was going on in NYC. As it turned out, not much of anything was going on. He feared riots or looting, but nothing ensued. I made up the guest bed (a queen-sized that used to be my regular bed, when I was living in the apartment; it’s nice and comfy) for him, and he crashed around 11pm. Around 2am, he opened my door, mistaking it for the bathroom. Fortunately, he didn’t try to urinate on me. That was pretty much the peak of the night of the blackout.

The main casualty appears to be my desktop computer (this is being written on my wi-fi laptop). It won’t boot, and it doesn’t sound like the hard drives are running. I’ll take it to my dad’s tomorrow to figure out what’s wrong. It’s my amateur assumption that the surge fucked up the power supply, or a circuit on the motherboard, keeping power from getting to the drives and allowing it to boot. Dad said something about the Bios getting zapped. We’ll see. There’s nothing super-irreplaceable on the desktop machine. I did rip all of my CDs onto the desktop, but that would just take time to replace, if the drives are scorched.

Suffice to say, I will likely go Office Space on my surge protector next week. I promise to post pictures.

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