By: Ben
Johnson
The problem with being a writer, a problem with
being a writer, is…
Actually, using the phrase “the problem with
being a writer” is a problem with being a writer. That’s such a douche phrase.
Could you imagine if you said that out loud? Like to another person, in a
conversation, and the other person in the conversation did not start that
conversation by asking you “hey, Ben, what is a problem with being a writer?” I
would die of embarrassment the instant I became aware that I used those words.
You know in old cartoons where Bugs Bunny
tricks Elmer Fudd, and Elmer Fudd is walking, and he realizes he’s been
tricked, so he turns and looks at the camera and turns into a lollipop that
says “SUCKER” on it? Well realizing that you’ve just used the phrase “the
problem with being a writer” is like that, except instead of a lollipop you
turn into Ira Glass. It still says “SUCKER” on your Ira Glass face, though.
Nobody has asked me, and probably nobody ever
will ask me, to articulate a problem with being a writer. It’s very likely that
nobody will ever care what I think is an example of a problem with being a
writer. It’s supremely, extraordinarily likely that if you are reading this
right now, you’ve read the last two sentences and taken them as permission not
to care, and if you still have any interest whatsoever in reading the rest of this,
you’re at the point now where you consider it a slog. Because I haven’t gotten
to the point. I’ve only been overly self-aware so far in a transparently neurotic
bid to get you to like me. That’s a problem with being a writer too.
The problem I’m experiencing most right now is
that I’ve spent so much time writing things that this is now how my brain works.
I process information like I am writing that information. I summarize and
reorder, and try to find the most precise description of my feelings, and I
distill everything I experience and think and feel that passes a basic
threshold of importance of “this is a thing I am experiencing and thinking and
feeling” into these whimsical little bon mots to publish and disseminate and
then either move on from or be able to look at later if and when needed, and I
have done this often enough for it to become the only process I can use to get
through anything. THAT is a problem with being a writer.
I’m in the middle of something massive and
confusing right now, with massive and confusing and conflicting feelings, and
my goddamn writer brain is going to work on everything, like stomach bacteria,
breaking every damn thought or feeling that pops into my head into little Ira
Glass “SUCKER” metaphorical turns of phrase for me to listen to while I walk
around like I’m a goddamn podcast of myself. “Stomach bacteria” for example. It’s
not like fucking stomach bacteria at all. It’s the passage of time and the normal,
massive, confusing changes that life brings to a person. It has nothing
whatsoever to do with stomach bacteria. Stomach bacteria are for digestion,
this is the emotional equivalent alternate meaning of the word “digest,” so,
fuck, actually that is a pretty good metaphor.
ACT 2: The
Things We Say to One Another When We Know Things Aren’t Quite Right…
Ira Glass. Oh man. What a chump. He understands
exactly how to be Ira Glass and how to do exact Ira Glass things in the perfect
Ira Glass way where you can hate Ira Glass all you want but you are still
interested most of the time when Ira Glass is doing a thing. Ira Glass is exactly
so much Ira Glass, and for so long, that he sometimes sounds like he’s going to
explode on the air, like the whole of his being is an overripe pimple and one
day it’ll just pop and there will be no more Ira Glass, and we’ll all just go, “oh,
yeah, got it. Whew, that was a good one.”
I do not want to process information that way.
I want my life to be a big stinky mess, and I want to sit in it, a mess myself,
and I want to be able to write in a way that is also a mess, that reflects how
messy everything always is, giant limpid pools of cess-riddled mess, piled pet
hair, permanently itched nostrils, dead time with people in it, some arguing crows
too lazy to even fly, suffering from Time Disease, and here I am, walking
distance to two dildo stores now. There are bricks in the sink and I wash them.
My life is a new job. My hands are made of hand meat and hand skin. They are
not for anything. I’m bruggled, and
torp a chough to shand with. I’ve possened. I’m a me machine. Kept her motor
clean.
I’m being cryptic. My mother is reading this
and she is worried. She cannot stop herself from worrying about me because she
is my mother, and then I give her a reason to be worried, like a paragraph that
doesn’t make sense, every word I say to be pored over like a suicide note
because I don’t talk because I can’t talk because she worries whether I talk or
don’t talk, and I am worried too and just want to not be worried, want to sit
at the bottom of the ocean for a while even if the pressure is so great it squishes
my head like a rotten pumpkin, long enough that when I come up I am not defending
myself to my mother or myself or God or anybody else.
I am fine. Everything is fine. I just have a
lot to deal with right now. I promise I will reach out if… I reach out. I will
do that if I do that. I will do everything I do if I do it, from now on, and I
do not want or need anything to make sense anymore, and I damn sure don’t want
to be an Ira Glass stomach bacteria about it, converting my whole life into
LOLs to be shit out and favorited and liked and shared and retweeted and
understood by anybody, especially me.
I do not want to do that. But I can’t stop it
from happening inside of me. It sucks. I’m my own least favorite subject. I’m
as bored as you probably are, and I’m sorry. I should have kids by now. I
should have already turned to dust and been sucked up to the moon. I don’t have
an excuse or a gramble to fust. I’m Borgnine.
