I don’t want to write about sandwiches anymore. I don’t even particularly want to be writing this, now. And that’s more or less the problem with both the form of the writing and the form of me. I lose interest. Chronically. It’s part of a larger problem that I fear I am only beginning to understand. There are other symptoms with names I am still learning, and ‘losing interest’ is the neither the most nor the least harmful.
Perhaps, losing interest, which always precedes regaining it—so far, that has been the pattern, regardless of how unlikely it seems to continue—is simply the structure of a ride the curves and twists with which I have yet to become adequately familiar. But even in writing this sickly metaphor, I find another, more sickly: that there is nothing more boring than a rollercoaster one has ridden far too many times. Rather, there is nothing more exciting than your first time on a new rollercoaster. The twists, turns, loops and drops have not yet become blunt with anticipation. As regards rollercoasters, intimacy breeds impotence. And that’s where the metaphor’s usefulness ends. Despite being far from intimate with, though exceedingly and increasingly aware of, my own pattern of twists and drops, I remain—this is my feeling—utterly impotent.
I don’t have to say that I’m not referring to erectile dysfunction, but some of you will enjoy my saying so, and a good comic—something I once lost interest in becoming—never denies an audience their preferred slop, even if it necessitates denying himself in the process. Having lost interest—perhaps, I simply didn’t acquire sufficient gumption; we’ll never know (I’m not interested in gaining it)—I am neither a good nor a bad comic, and to engage in the slinging of this same slop—the sandwich writing—over and over again is a form of self-denial to which I have a unique revulsion.
I must change; to my own detriment, I must change. The ‘what’ of the ‘into’ has yet to reveal itself. There are, for better or worse—at the moment, for worse—things I have always been and will always be. A writer, I suppose is on that list; writing is something I return to, often reluctantly, though the joy is hard won. In this way, writing is an exceedingly tough nut to crack; though, it is a very good nut, and the brain seems to learn this over time. It is only that I wish the brain would remember better the best manner by which to open the shell. To use another metaphor, my condition is something akin to an amnesiatic squirrel. For a time, sandwiches acted as the scent-path to that long and deeply buried acorn. It is only that the digging became tiresome, and the fruit, languishing underground and through weather, festering with rot and increasingly unworthy of pursuit.
You come to expect, with time, the nut to grow, the reward to increase with effort, repeated or prolonged. But as I have been alluding, I have not found that to be the case, and so I’ve tried other nuts, other routes to their unearthing, many that have nothing to do with writing, some that have led me far away from where the former lie. Most recently, I fancied myself the next Franz Gertsch—delusion provides a rich facsimile of ‘the nut’—but I lost steam, as it were, before ever really catching the scent. A squirrel anosmiatic, to alter the metaphor.
I would dearly love to be consistent, to remain a thing, but to be so seems to be contrary to my own hardwiring. So much so, that I have lost the energy, even the will, to fight it. I change, for better or worse, I must change. Really, it is not I that changes at all, being that it is the object of interest and not the ‘I’ that changes. The ‘I’ does the changing, and so the ‘I’ remains. And yet, this bit of writing is far from good enough to inspire any consolation in the ‘I’ that’s doing it.
At the moment, I’m depressed, but not so much that I am incapable of writing. Someone close to me once said, after reading a piece similarly morose to this, that they were worried about me. I responded that is not when I have written something that they should worry, rather it is when I haven’t that they should be concerned.