Tortured

"There is nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." - Ernest Hemingway

Oh, Ernest!  You understand me!  Somebody understands me!  That is exactly what writing is like.  Especially today.  Today I am so lonely and broken and tired.  I mean, writing.  There is so much typing and thinking and imagining and putting pen to paper and living and absorbing and sometimes the computer comes unplugged while you're busy spewing out your genius and sometimes there are typos (oh, the typos!) and you must pay attention to grammar and punctuation and it just hurts.  It hurts so bad. 

So.  Bad.  

Do you know what would help?  If the world only understood!  Yes, I wish the rest of you got it, you reviewers and readers and "like"-rs.  You office workers and wall street workers and construction workers.  But no, you live such hollow, passionless lives.  The artist, only he is truly alive.  And among all artists, the writer lives the most.  I mean, he writes.  He puts his ideas into words.  Who else does that?

As Rod Serling once said about his own passion for writing:

"I didn't embrace it.  I succumbed to it."  

This is the truth of all artists.  We live lives of pure pain  until we are finally overcome, at which point we succumb to the horror of earning a portion of our living off of our intellectual property.  (As if any idea could ever truly belong to anyone.)  We finally, reluctantly embrace the Herculean responsibility of stacking letters into comprehensible ideas and posting them on the internet or wrapping them in paper.

From that day forward, we are doomed. 

Here is a final quotation.

"Steppenwolf, you must learn to laugh." 

Yes, Hermann Hesse.  Perhaps that is the answer.  But with this terrible curse I endure, how will I ever learn to do that? 

Woe is me.  Woe is me.  This hairshirt I wear, it stinks of alpaca.

. . .

PS Buy my book.