Please don’t read this.

It’s a crooked, disjointed fire for a fine day. Dinner was good, work was good, the new wine was good, there’s not much to complain. Oh, sure, I could talk about the commute, but I won’t. I felt productive today. I didn’t finish as much as I would have liked, but the things I did get done I felt I did well. It’s a good feeling, this doing things well. The fire is really going today. I tried to give the logs more room to breath, and that seemed to have worked. Instead of just smoke and a small fire, I have huge flames. I don’t think there’s enough wood in there to burn for long, but it’s nice while it lasts. And it’s warm. The rain that blankets Seattle like a wet towel gives me the chills when I’m not careful. The fire chases that away lickety quick.

I planned to write a story about driving, but I don’t want to. It would just sound like an extension of my complaining that I’m becoming increasingly obsessed with lately. I’m sick of complaining. I want to find happiness again, calmness. With that said, I don’t know what I should write. I’ve been listening to a lot of PRI on XM radio, that’s Public Radio International on my car’s XM satellite radio. At the times I drive, there are many shows about artists. This evening, they focused on something Newman, maybe Randy Newman, a songwriter. I thought he wrote country songs, but they’re bluesy, and he combines his raspy almost-bad voice with incredible storytelling lyrics to create phenomenal, if not popular, music.

I have all this energy and nothing to say. I’m tempting to reach over and flip on whatever movie I’m in the middle of watching, but I’ll resist for a bit longer. I’m again having thoughts about whether what I’m doing is a waste of time. I have these thoughts now and again, and it’s not exactly a complaint, it’s more of a realistic review of my goals. I was concentrating on the law today, discussing it, reading case law, analyzing interesting legal issues. As I’ve found before, I’m good at this stuff. When I worked with Doug, we used to have discussion for hours and hours over good dinner and better wine about legal issues, and I enjoyed it. My thoughts come back to whether I’m wasting my time putting down these words. Whether, instead, I should be focusing on my career and the law.

Dreary discussions for a dreary day. I have to be honest with myself, something I don’t like to do too often. I want to be a great writer, but I don’t see greatness in any of my writing. I see a few interesting stories, but there’s nothing special about it, except that I write it. It was my problem with my poetry. I wrote poetry, but I couldn’t tell whether it was good or not. That’s why I don’t read poetry: I can’t judge it. There’s nothing there for me to know. The ones that rhyme or tell a story or have an interesting cadence, I enjoy. But it’s hard for me to tell the difference between the works. I’m not talking about judging a good work or a bad work, since that, for the most part, is subjective. It’s more about judging any work. If the grammar is good, hell, it must be a good poem. How can I create poems if I can’t even judge the value of other people’s poems?

One could respond that I should not be rating my own work against others. That if I like my poem, why the fuck should I worry about what others say about it. I agree with those people, but at the same time, I can’t stop asking myself about quality and, in particular, the quality of my own writing. I can tell you about good music or good movies or good books. Blah. That’s not a good argument. I know good writing, and I know good poetry, I’m just looking for an excuse. I talk with real writers, ones who don’t worry about what others think of their writing, and I can’t help but compare. I’m the Keating to the real artist’s Roark. I want to profit from art, not do art for the sake of doing art. What’s my real goal with writing? Become a best-selling author. And why do I want to do that? So I can live the way I want to live without working. Do you see the logic? Why do I like uniqueness? Because then others can look at it and see it. I don’t like it for its own sake. Or, at least, I don’t like it much for its own sake.

I’m babbling tonight. I’ve been babbling for the last few days looking for something, reaching to find something that remains out of reach. I’m going to write 2,000 words today for the sake of writing 2,000 words. I look for inspiration in my older writings, and I find nothing and complaints and, what’s that word I used, oh, yes, consternations. I guess that’s where I am today, in a consternated mood.

I tried to drink caffeine today, but my drug dealer closed before I could escape my 4pm meeting. I thought a jolt would get me moving—allow me to escape the drudgery that I find myself in on the page. I’ll have to wait until this weekend. Doolies is coming up, and I’m excited to see her. I’ve haven’t held her in two weeks, and that’s too long, way too long.

My fire is cheery today. I like cheery fires. I wish I shared my fires mood, but I don’t. I’m closing in on deliciously depressed, which is a state I like to find. I don’t think it’ll last long enough for me to appreciate, but I’m hopeful.

I look all around me for distraction, and although I find much of it, nothing interests me enough to be distracted. Do you know how that feels to be surrounded by so much to do and yet to want to do none of it? It’s how kids are usually. They have everything in the world, twice as much junk as their parents at their age, but, just like their parents at their age, they don’t want to play with any of it or do anything. So much wasted time and effort being bored. I filled half my life with boredom. To think how I could have better used that time to do, well, to do anything.

The ashes glow red at the bottom of the fire. There are piles of ashes scattered on the floor of the fireplace. I’ll have to sweep them up eventually. It’s still burning, but the top wood is almost gone. It cracks and breaks apart, and I give it another ten minutes and it’ll fall and join the ashes on the ground, to smolder slowly until it burns out completely, ready to be fuel for tomorrow.

Extreme babbling today. Have I mentioned that? If I have, then that doesn’t matter much. I’m just trying to fill up space, make it to 2,000 words to say that I made it that far. It’s a goal, nothing more, nothing less. I won’t have achieved anything when I reach it, but, but I don’t know. I don’t know.

This is the emptiness I talk about. In my mind, nothing is going on. The gerbil turns and turns on his wheel, and there’s lots of smoke produced, but in the end, there’s not much to show for the energy use. Doolies interruption, but not long enough to matter or deliver inspiration. Did you know that balancing a laptop on your lap is dangerous for reproduction? There was a published study that said that what I’m doing now, typing while lying down with the laptop on my legs and crotch, was dangerous for two reasons: first, the heat of the laptop raised the temperature of the scrotum and did bad things to the sperm, and, second, when a guy has a laptop on his legs, he tends to keep his legs closer together to balance the laptop, which, in turn, raises the temperature of the scrotum, and, I’m sure you see where this goes. I just thought I’d share this useless bit of scrotum trivia. There’s a funny looking word: scrotum.

Continuing with my random thoughts about nothing, since I’m only five-hundred words away from my silly goal—and, there goes the logs. I was close on the ten-minute prediction. The big pieces of wood have fallen to the ground and the logs are glowing red. They’ll cool soon and darken. The last log is still on fire, but I expect it won’t last long. Without the wood on top of it burning, the fire should go out soon.

I never did conclude about the writer vs. lawyer discussion I started earlier. I don’t really have any conclusions or comments about it. I don’t know how it ends up or where I go with it. I want to deep down in my toes create something. That was always my problem with the law and my job: I don’t create anything but paper. Why do I want to create? Good question. I want to create because it puts me back in touch with my emotions and lets me examine the world around me. Not as good an answer as a question. That’s what artists provide: a lens to look at life through. I’m not providing much of a lens. Sure, I write prose, some of it good, but I don’t use that prose to do anything or say anything. It’s a hack’s job I fulfill with those hope of others being suckered enough to want to read my hackness, if you will.

I could write another few paragraphs and fulfill my goal, but I won’t. It’s not because I’m a quitter or because the last three-hundreds words would be hard to get—remember, after the Marathon, three-thousand words isn’t hard for me to write. It’s more just because. You’ll have to take my word for it.