FULL BLEED: CURES YOU WHISPER MAKE NO SENSE

Survived last week. Oh, did I mention that it was a thing to be survived? It was. Or at least endured. Seems like more of those events are popping up as I crawl along from hours to days to decades. Sometimes they’re the kind of thing you just watch and know you have no influence over, just that they’ll happen and keep happening and there’s not a goddamn thing to be done about it other than try and minimize the damage, an ongoing triage and attempt to stop the psychic bleeding and hope it never slips to the physical metaphorical stage. ‘Cause then you gotta think about the end and whatever that might manifest itself as. “Oh, you have a lot more influence over this life than you think,” I was taught as a kid and I believe that I can attempt to manage my own reaction to these things, but stopping these things from happening? Yeah, no.

We’re all doing it, every day. We keep doing it. We must imagine ourselves happy, I guess. Or at least having staved off the Big Event for another twenty-four. ‘Cause you know, could be any time. Any old time. That was one of the things drilled into me in the class I took called “Introduction to Death,” and yeah, that was a big one, even a turning point for my *snert* academic career. You think it’s a distant thing, maybe like a train traveling at you over the space of days, but it’s off in the future. Time and space are conspiring to keep you from dealing with it one day at a time. But the fact is, it’s a trapdoor that you’re standing on, I’m standing on, we’re standing on. Just sometimes you can see the door is creakier for some folks than others. Or maybe it just gives way at once. Sorry, kid. Bad hand. Shovel your chips to the dealer and head to the nearest Bardo.

But if you’re dumb about it, you can start thinking on it too much, dwelling on it a little too long. Rather than, as my longtime pal Ken Lowery put it “Thinking about death a normal amount.” You shift it to the abnormal. Or maybe you’re living in constant reminder of it, that can trigger that sort of thing, too.

Anyways, last week was kind of a big one in that regard. I won’t burden or bore you with the details. Just that it rammed the subject home, a bunch of them. Aging, decrepitude, what to do with the time you’ve got even if you don’t know what to do with it or feel like you can’t do much at all. A potent and sometimes bitter stew, yeah. Still working my way through it, honestly. Legacy and achievement and the relentless pursuit of it and yeah, I’m in the middle of that, right? What are these books for, if not that? “Oh but the pleasure of writing them,” I’ll be scolded the second I post this. But what’s a legacy in writing when writing is being subjected to an at-best corrosive environment of Hobbesian scrabbling as the whole works is being disassembled along several fronts including the industry that says it most champions literature.

But enough of Universities, right? Oh wait, I meant publishing as a corporate enterprise.

So, yeah. Thinking too much. Which of course is breaking my own first rule about writing. And hell, even Cormac McCarthy gets it. Saw an interview with him where he talks about “the night shift,” ie, the unconscious mind and the work it does in putting this stuff together and making it all work. Granted, this is also the same Cormac McCarthy who set himself up as kind of a capstone on Western literature with Blood Meridian, having the Judge himself talk about how he wasn’t reducible into anything else, a Biblically-euphonious epic of sprawling amorality and how giving a man a Bible won’t instruct him on much of anything. Fun at parties, I bet.

But yeah, overthinking. Overthinking everything. Is that defusing the fear of the weird process of writing or incarnating it? The thought that this is all ending up as what? Nothing? On a long enough timeline, it’s gonna happen. Unless the universe really does, as Terrence McKenna suggests, crave novelty of every kind so maybe it goes on to live in a Primordial Undermind (or in my parlance, an Oversoul, a concept we haven’t quite gotten to in the Hazeland books but will. Maybe.)

But it’s hard to watch all these structures be disassembled in near realtime. Literature, what’s that even? Can you get ten professors to agree on ten works from the last twenty five years to be worthy of addition to the Blessed Canon? Murakami maybe? The rest of it is hype and hot air and who can get onto Oprah’s Book Club the quickest before their cover gets blown. Which is not to say that worthy work isn’t being written. That’s not it at all. Just that there’s been a significant enough fragmentation in the literature-making enterprise that coming into any manner of concordance on it is, ah, difficult. But then we’re living through a time of fragmented audiences of all kind. Why should any particular genre be different, or any mode? (We can argue about literary fiction being its own genre another time, though maybe that’s one of those things that happen when we get a ‘neo’ attached to a genre or mode and then all of a sudden it’s about expression of purity rather than marking a period where a thing first happened, or group of things unrelated that we put next to one another in a post-facto kind of manner.)

Is this, all of this, just writers trying to King Canute themselves out of getting swamped by that brackish wave that’s rolling on in?

I don’t know anymore. I’m not even sure if I ever did. And if so, I was probably full of shit. Maybe even now.

Just that it’s troubling to do all this and not know how any of it is going to turn out. Don’t give me that “Nothing ever ends, Adrian,” Dr. Manhattan. Things end all the time. Things are ending right now. The cretin army got themselves the controls and, like cretins, don’t know how to keep anything going. There are times I wish I was a cretin, honestly. Seems like it’d be easier. But I got stuck being whatever I am a long time ago. Slow on the uptake, yeah. Unfortunately not quite a cretin.

And maybe it’s always tough. It was tough when I was tossing work into the void. It was tough when I was serializing my comic online and getting no views for it, instead, comments from dudes saying “I’m just going to print this in a binder and read it later” and yeah. Maybe it’s always tough, just tougher ‘cause I’m older and the reflexes aren’t quite there and I thought it’d be different by now. Well, it is different, just different and mostly worse, mostly more unstable, mostly more precarious, mostly working harder for smaller audiences, mostly every platform saying “come on board, we’re here to help creators” and then altering the bargain over time to make the platform the primary recipient of author funds (talk to indie authors about how much they spend on Amazon ads, for instance.)

I know. There’s no promises and never have been. Just a short time of what felt like relative prosperity which has had a belt-sander taken to it.

And maybe this is all stalling. Fear that even if I get this book done, sitting down with the void and letting the night shift take the wheel, that it goes nowhere, remains largely unread or somehow worse, becomes the target of the day for BookTok or whichever frustrated writer on YouTube has decided that grousing is a better way to make money than actually writing. Monetized grousing, a scourge of contemporary society if ever there was one, right?

Back to the and maybes. And maybe it’s fear that when all’s said and done, the impact of all these things will be a hummingbird in a hurricane. But that’s probably a dumb thing to worry about. Or a selfish and myopic thing. Or a human thing. But then so’s worrying that you step outside that comfy cave and you’re gonna be eaten by dire wolves or cats the size of Volkswagen bug with teeth to match.

Do I feel any better about this after this low-grade lancing the boil? I dunno. I just know it’s hard. The rewards are tenuous, even if you allow yourself to see them.

Until next time, folks.

Oh, decided to schedule Shadow and Silence (that being the collection of Hazeland books 1-3, no new material because I’m not a jerk) for mid-October. We’ll see if that holds.

In the meantime, take care of yourselves. Take care of each other.