My apartment has this horrific suction. It is a gravitational well centered over my laptop. It pulls me in, renders me incapable of doing anything other than reading frivolous shit on the Internet.
It takes real, concerted effort to break away from that.
I guess my bed’s a gravitational well too. It’s unreal how long it takes me to get out of it in the morning.
Physically there’s no reason I can’t move, yet every one of my muscles feels like it weighs a thousand pounds. My mind is getting in the way – and what the hell is my mind? It’s a wispy, undefined pattern of nerve signals. It’s an invisible thing that’s somehow pinning me down to . . . to what, to myself? I am the hand that is pushing myself down.
That’s the sickness – that’s what makes it so hard to get away from this. There’s no clear input, no clear output. I am the hand, so I can’t lift it; I am it.
None of this shit I am saying here is new or interesting or insightful. I’ve already said it all before. I think. Even if I haven’t, someone else has.
Someone, somewhere, felt every one of my feelings before I did. My feelings were therefore already tired before I even felt them.
If even I have trouble taking my own feelings seriously, then how can I expect anyone else to? Is it possible, in twenty-first century America, to be “sincere” without also being banal?
Look at the way I’m compelled to put quotation marks around “sincere.” It’s because I know I’ll look ridiculous if I say the word without them.
I know it’s much simpler to just be detached. The beauty of “irony” is that it very conveniently allows you to avoid directly talking about about anything painful or embarrassing. Except you have to talk about those things, don’t you?
It’s hard. I can write about “sincerity.” I can’t write about sincerity. “Sincerity” is simple. Sincerity, though – how do you do it? How do you frame it in a way that it hasn’t been framed a hundred thousand million times before?
How can I talk honestly about my own “malaise” or “pain” or whatever without coming off as incredibly naive? Maybe the answer is that I can’t, and maybe that’s okay. Maybe “writing well” involves running the risk of looking like an idiot. You have to be fearless, because most bad art starts with fear.
I think I’ve said that before, or maybe it was somebody else. It seems very much like the kind of thing somebody must have said already. The more I think about it, the more I doubt that it was me.
What if none of my thoughts are real? What if they’re all second-hand? Maybe, without even knowing it, I’m just repeating shit I’ve heard other people say.
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