I just downloaded a handful of new songs earlier, which is kind of a big deal here (most songs are $2). It’s Friday night and off brands are working the unit; I just bought a bar of fudge, and am jamming out to the new Post Malone shit, which, apparently, is actually the old Post Malone shit, according to my brother. Shit’s straight; I’m jailin’ good.
Feeling a little self-conscious and wonder if I’m a loser, a fuckup, or just someone normal stuck in an abnormal situation. I think about the many games life plays, the tiny twists of chance that accumulate into catastrophe, or, conversely, stimulate success (although we all de-emphasize the role of luck in our achievements).
I’ve been taking refuge in books again, a stubborn habit I’ve had since first reading Harry Potter. It’s something I’ve always done, only the extent waxing and waning–an adverse influence only during certain periods of highschool when I opted out of fully participating in life for the vicarious experiences of books.
I’m such a nerd when it comes to the written word that I even have a favorite dictionary (American Heritage, 5th Edition). I also go thru phases of obsession with a particular writer where I not only devour their entire oeuvre, but I also adopt their personal characteristics and strive to parallel my life after theirs. The first one was F. Scott Fitzgerald…I honestly believe he’s the reason why I so readily picked up smoking: I had a book of his with a photograph of him smoking a cigarette and thereafter, smoking and writing were forever inextricably linked together in my mind, cigarettes being one of the accoutrements of the genius writer.
Then it was Hemingway and Joyce and Kerouac. After starting college, my tastes matured, or, more accurately, became more contemporary: Charles Bukowski, Bret Easton Ellis, David Foster Wallace, Gavin McInnes, Lesley Arfin, Jim Goad, Cat Marnell, Jude Angelini. However, as this literary evolution progressed, my own personal transformation was already closely mirroring the writers I admired. It reached a point where, upon listening to a podcast, I heard Jude Angelini joke about selling dick pills, a come up based on helping other dudes get hard, while I had been doing this exact same thing for months already, having purchased hundreds of Indian viagras for a couple bucks each and upselling them for $10-15 a pop.
(A profound lesson of economics, which women either know intuitively or learn incidentally: the more dudes you can get hard from afar, the more easy money you’ll accrue.)
So now my tastes have evolved into self-obsession, with my writing and my life, the latter impervious to drastic alterations due to circumstances. If reading prompts me to reflection, then writing is how I actively process those thoughts and ideas. Moreover, I’m optimizing my time by instilling healthy habits, like sculpting my body and shaping my mind. I’ve done more writing in the past year and a half than I had in the previous six. I’m basically sitting on a book’s worth of material right now.
Easy Trouble 