Europium

It's a rare metal extracted from the depths of the earth. Also, it is a play on words. Can you figure it out? Doesn't matter. I've hit the wall as the exercise buffs say, following the words of Colin Wilson: "The Outsider's salvation lie within extremes." Or something like that. I know I posted that elsewhere but so what. What's the difference?

I think I indulged myself enough in the introduction. I think it is pretentious of me to think that because this whole thing is self-indulgent. But in the end I think it's going to save me a lot of time. Writers, upon finding even mid-level success, are constantly attacked by slobbering fans--necessary as they are, beloved as they are--asking questions about where they get their ideas, maybe how they grew up, stuff like that. These people are curious. They read our works under the auspices that we either somehow know more than they do, have seen more than they have, and can snap our fingers and automatically be adorned with wealth. None of this is true. A lot of writers have their own answers to the two main questions: "Why do you write?" and "Where do your ideas come from?" I know some of those answers because I read a great deal. My answers are often not different from theirs. They are "Because I have to," and "I don't know." That last answer needs a re-write.

"I don't care." Without ideas I have nothing. If there's a pile in space I cannot find it. My ideas hit me like punches to the face. I'm used to being punched in the face. I've been taking them all my life and really do not expect the blows to stop any time soon. Each one makes me feel more like one of the Fallen than one of the Saved. Writing itself is a glorious, exciting thing but doing it and trying to make a living from it is a fucking punch line waiting to happen. And I accept that.

Those around me do not. Everywhere I go in the Obamanomy I am asked "where do you work? What do you do for a living?"

"I'm a writer."

"No, but where do you work?" It's almost as if they know. Well, of course they know. They know I am broke because they can see me. They can see my old clothes and ruined face. They follow up with "You got a job?"

I know what they mean. Do I have a square job, the kind with a steady paycheck and insurance and all that shit that society deems important. No. I don't. Not these days. And I have absolutely zero ambition to get one. Why? Well, first, let me tell you how I answer.

"I just told you. I'm a writer. I write. I submit. If accepted, I get paid (holding back the word "sometimes") and then I write some more." Usually the conversation ends there. I might get a "Lucky You" or a scoff, and more often it is the scoff. Hoi-polloi don't understand why I have to write. They don't understand how a person can be willing to sacrifice respect and social standing and the green folding God in order to persue a dream that ends up in failure and suicide more often than not. I refuse to bother trying to make them get it. I tried to when I was young and stupid, before I realized how pointless it is to ask another human being with a fixed thought process to empathize with a "loser" like me.

It's like gambling. A writer can publish a story and make more dough from that than a factory worker makes in two weeks. Or the writer makes nothing and is fucked. A writer can publish a best-seller and make enough money to never have to lift another fucking finger. And let's not even get started on movie rights. Or a writer drinks themselves to death or overdoses on drugs of choice. Also, the answer can be all of the above.

Should I blame my father and my sister for driving me from studious young boy into occasional maniac? I could. I don't. All they did, really, was pat me on my ass and send me on down the road. I chose to walk it. I own my Hell. I rule it. Those phony smiley glad-handers and jackass-y self-help scribblers are dingbats that make me puke and they rule the workplace. Being egregious by nature, I will never fit in. I never have. I fit in nowhere. I have been told before that I cannot be placed on the right or the left. I agree. Why?

Because I think for myself. Genuinely. Not just by farcical claims, but in action and deed. Authority bothers me. I know when to shut up but being bossed around grates my soul. My soul, not just my nerves. My very essence bristles at being told "Rob do this, Rob do that, Rob...don't do that." I've had plenty of "jobs". All junk. Cleaning gutters, fixing sewers, lifting crates, answering phones, flipping burgers, escorting wannabe toughs out of bars, collecting money for certain people who gather green via means of ill-repute and other unmentionable things. The sad thing is anything that does not require me to punch a fucking clock, I can do with a grin. If I have to clock-in, wash my hands, paste on a smile, repeat the spiel, say thank-you-sir-ma'am-have-a-nice-day or wear some fucking frock that reads "How May I Help YOU?" I want to kill myself and everyone around me, I want to make a fucking molotov cocktail or twenty and just start blowing shit up but I don't because I know that would be wrong. These days it would be terrorism. Well, I'm not a terrorist, I'm just a writer.

Everything else is a waste of time. One day I will die. I will die with memories of having a nail driven through my hand by a dickhead father for getting an F in math. Of sleeping on stone. Of being taunted by a sister who was-and is-jealous of the things I can do, who did not mind siccing her boyfriends on me or even stabbing me in the back of the neck with a salad fork. But don't worry--I rearranged her intestinal track for that offense. She's not a woman to me, and never will be. She's just a fucking cunt. She the female version of my father. They act and talk alike and still talk to one another and they are both pathological liars and megalomaniacs as evidenced by the fact that they think everyone is a liar and I will die knowing these things and I do not care as long as I can one day give my wife a nice life. It doesn't have to be ostentatious, just nice. When I die I'll be taking nothing with me and neither will anyone else. Tell me how important your Escolade is now.

I will never, regardless of my thinking patterns, therapy, drugs, booze, and other shit that doesn't work like OOH-SAH and Yoga, be able to stand punching a clock and listening to some task-oriented cocksucker breathe down my neck because they're afraid I might fuck something up. This is even worse when sid cocksucker is ten years younger than me and thinks he's some sort of Don Mega because he makes four dollars more an hour and has a credit card. Those pieces of plastic are nothing but knives in disguise waiting to slit your wallet wide, and, failing that, making sure that J.P. Fatback with his platoon of monster-cocked whargouls bend you over and sodomize you until your spine pops out of your throat. The kissing-ass-climb-the-ladder-materialism game has proven itself, to me, to be nothing but a glamour. A mirage. A way to keep the trees blocking the forest. Well, fuck that. I'd rather wear a sandwich board and shout "THE END IS NIGH!"

Shit, if you read the news these days, maybe that isn't such a bad idea.

See? See this horrifying wrong-thinking? Parents, love your children. Nurture them. Praise them and direct them towards sports. Otherwise they might grow up to be artists and go mad from failure. Maybe killing animals and starting fires. Hammering bones into dust and twirling about the backyard to cover up the evidence. Yeah, don't kick the shit out of them.

But if you do at least explain yourself. Don't say something stupid like my father did the day he knocked me out at the fully-grown-ready-to-handle-a-marine's fist age of 12.

"Because it's Tuesday!"

Well. I certainly couldn't expect better from the man who gave me my first memory, that of my mother screaming while he held a knife to her throat and cursed while April and I hid under the table. I was 3.