Heartfelt sentimental sap with a teaspoon of truth.

The problem with wanting to write is…a million. But the compulsion to write is always there. I read that Dostoevsky suffered from epilepsy and that he went to the military academy for civil engineering. He also was penniless more than once and yet literally moved Russia with his first novel Notes from the Underground. I'm honestly a bit baffled and don't have any concept of the political or socioeconomic mental of that day, but it happened. I imagine he didn't expect the impact. I think he was insufferably critical of himself, and yet, he wrote profusely, I think with an indifference, a determination. There's an introspection and detachment from what is so subtle and everyday, what is often "unsaid" but what cudgels the brain into an inability to "make sense", let alone express feeling or longing or despair, or maybe a blinding euphoria or maybe the deepest, waiting gladness. Do you feel it? that passing emotion? was it there? Did you pay it attention? No, it's almost imperceptible. It's nothing. Why express what you don't understand? why tell someone? But it was there. "Where is he today? Will he write his book? Why can't we know what we don't know? why am I my own worst critic, sitting here, whisky in hand, and knowing i've known more than this. i'm not exactly the train wreck in Notes, deliberately elaborating on why 2+2 makes 4 and why there is nothing for it but to do nothing, because to move, is to get trampled or expend engery you don't have or slam into a glass wall you can't avoid if you take one step the inevitable wrong direction. i can't be that, an irrefutable math problem. i don't have only one answer, and i've been loved."

This candor of heart and mind, with some intuition of what is good writing and a talent for description, held as a winter globe in the left hand—the story, and the relentless pen in the right hand, this is makes the story in the mind's eye, a book, a complete piece. This is when the detached and disinterested public opens one eye and blinks. "What's that? This is a window into a mind. What kind of mind is this, that shamelessly exhales…and in print, let alone before the little people who see him in his little world? This character isn't afraid of living…."

You have to have nerve to write. You have to have an ego to be willing to tell the public "not only is this worth reading, it's good." And you have to believe it is good. It's putting your neck on the line for a car to run over your head. Why write to merely attempt? Why write to merely impress? Then you've stopped before you began. You're conforming to a book, the image of you for everyone to see, and everyone thinks you're a great novelist and eagerly awaits your next piece, when you think "that book", that epitomised tale, should provoke and fascinate fickle minds. It must teach and empathize and give voice to things we hardly speak. It can't be a work to merely pass the time or the motive of fame, an exaggerated view of oneself. It has to be an extension of oneself, a reflection of something seen or internalized. That's better writing, intentional writing, worthwhile writing. That must be art, living art. And the right hand diligently writes. The hand that holds your left and leads you down a shaded path. That hand that grips you when you don't speak, except with bright, curious eyes. You must move that pen if you're going to write.

I don't know how many times I've stared at the ground in the plaza. Do you ever have the sensation that moments of your day are the middle of a fish eye camera lens? That the commotion of the plaza, the clouds and blue sky and street lamps and looming plaza statue and periphery trees and the whole assortment of people milling and sitting about have always been there and for this moment you're walking between them? "Is that the same chubby face inserting that same fat hand into that same orfice of a mouth? What on God's green earth compels a child to do that? Who is his attractive mother and is she aware that her son has handled everything brown and green and small and rubbished? Does she see her son's new fascination and strange profile? I think I've seen her before? All these ambling, well-dressed, shapely women and high maintenance children are looking the same. ...I want to be a dad. How is it to have awife? What planet am I on?"

You've seen it all before but today you feel old and disproportionate, kind of oblong and bigheaded, a Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade blimp, or as if you're an ant peering up at your own inflated, slow motion body. You put one foot in front of the other and are aware that people see you, moving across the plaza, but you can't pay any more attention. "They'll be here tomorrow. I'll think they're interesting tomorrow. I'll sit there and stare again tomorrow. But last night…that was yesterday. That's why I'm irritable and so introverted. Who thinks it's ok to get completely drunk off his mind and then robbed at the front door? Why have I been woken on 2 hour intervals to unlock the door for five different people? What kind of wife loves and forgives that kind of idiocy? I need to eat something."