In immense physical pain from blisters in my brain, throat, ear and nose. Headache, tired, stretched stomach from pouring things down my throat to try and numb the pain as paracetamols aren’t doing anything… I´ve just rifled through a load of old idea notes and realised that the most important ones from this last year have gone missing. There was one about the expulsion of three massive spiders from the back garden; that could have been a short story, and several other brilliant woken in the middle of the night from a deep sleep quality ideas that are apparently now lost to eternity or the ether or swallowed back by the muse that must resent my having ignored them for such a long time before getting around to doing anything about them.
Is it my fault I have to work to pay bills? If I could afford to just drop everything and write for the sake of writing, I wouldn’t have a day job at all. It is immensely disappointing to live in a world where even professional working adults don’t seem to grasp that not everyone has the luxury to do what they want in life. My boss thinks if I don’t move home, it is because I choose one country or culture over another; whereas, in reality I am simply proactively grifting to stay employed (and thus able to pay for my living space month to month). Grifting because I swindle my own soul working in environments where no one seems to grasp sarcasm or care to discuss philosophy or cinema or art or literature or even common societal issues or current events. My cousins think I don’t love my country anymore; but don’t seem to listen when I say in over ten years of applying for jobs there I have not had one single offer while I get spontaneous calls and offers in a foreign country whose language I can barely speak that pay me three times what anyone back home would make doing the same. My frustrated life goals and ambitions mean that watching Oprah Master Classes just depresses me because all those other people´s stories turned around after they hit a bottom but mine seems to be snagged on the jagged edge of a below bottom crevice and won´t ever come lose no matter how many times its swept over, scraped, brushed or pulled at.
I was trying to think what would I wish for if I could wish one thing and it come true. World peace, ecological recovery and educated discussions in politics are obviously all impossibilities even for fairies to grant as they would involve the cooperation of masses of truculent humans. Reshaping humanity in the blink of an eye seems a bit much to ask. I mean we´ve been talking about the environmental impact of fossil fuels at least since the 1970´s and we´re all still putting petrol in our motors… So, thinking in the most purely selfish of terms… I am still stuck. Ideally it would be to make a living from writing; but I tried that and was on the brink of starvation until I gave in and took a full-time job with responsibilities. I tried doing it as a side-line and ended up having a stroke from working 60 to 80 hour weeks. So, my dreams are no longer my dreams as those died a long time ago. Wishing a publisher will take you seriously only gets a person so far. It actually is more likely to make you the target of small-time frauds that sell promotion to nowhere or contacts to no one or inclusion in inexistant respected circulars.
I said wish. At this time of year, I should be talking about new year´s resolutions but; they are really just wishes, aren’t they? Whether they come true or not depends on your own impetus because fairies don’t actually exist but if they did, they would not care what happens to humans. They´d sit and eat popcorn watching the psyches of people taught to aspire to more ripped apart by nepotism, glass ceilings, sexism, circumstance and exhaustion. In my case exhaustion is starting to have quite a bit to do with old age; but it is also the intellectual exhaustion of speaking into the void knowing that no one listens.