FUCKING CUBELAND

The mind recoils in terror.
Emotion runs wild, attention unable to stay its course, this level of awareness, perhaps due to the fact that I am reading an account of one of the greatest generals ever born. He led his Macedonian brethren to the fringes of India, from the Hellespont, and seemingly combined all aspects of areté, leadership and wisdom into such a short span of life. I look back, comparing myself to this masterful king, and feel so very small, insignificant with my extra forty pounds, my desk job, the feeble passions that arise, too often foundering at the walls of insecurity, at the broad sea of doubt. but doubt is only verified in its existence if you verify that it exists.
I find it incredibly hard to create if I doubt myself every step of the way. Shit. I am my most harsh critic, looking at my words, second guessing every bit of sentence, the structure of the whole string of words, and it comes up wanting. Why? These past few days, even tonight, I was full of happiness, neutrality, conversing with an old friend, catching up on each other’s lives, but now I am back, back to that level. Can my feeling of self-worth depend on the dripping faucet of self-doubt I felt when trying to add to the story, when trying to flesh out the background of the antagonist, the necessity driven woman, seeking salvation, even at the cost of others? God, I read these words, I can feel the drive draining out even now, standing in the book store, intimidated by the sheer volume of work, by the knowledge that my contribution is so small, that every attempt I make to come up with a story with my own ideas, is frustrated by the ideas, by the visions of others whose stories I have read. I know that I can write, I know that the story is sitting there, but is forcing its way out through a small opening, like a huge funnel stretching up into my imagination, and every thought I have sits at the top, hoping to find its way out through the nozzle.
Do I revile sitting in front of a monitor, as it is what I do for ten hours a day, receiving emails, checking files, requesting art approvals, coordinating rubberized mat purchases, having to tell some girl who’s been lending money out to people because our company decided not to pay people this month, even though the owner just bought a 35 million dollar apartment in NYC, checking on wire transfers, explaining templates and naming conventions to outside parties, crossreferencing manufacturer and retailer websites, calling out discrepancies in shipping requests, managing third party expectations, updating procedural manuals, while most others I see have the time to kick the fuck back and play card games for four hours a day.
Fuck yeah I’m bitching right now, because I’m fucking tired and want to write, but can’t stand to sit in front of a monitor any more, and can’t seem to find the courage to just quit, lay it all on the line, fuck the transitional period, just fucking quit and have to write to live, have to earn my fucking keep with the blisters forming on my fingers as they glide across the keyboard. They are fucking flying now, you know why? Because this shit is ingrained, because I send three dozen emails a day, mostly while doing something else simultaneously and get paid half of what the average fucking bloke needs to be able to live in this city, because it’s my fucking choice to get up every morning and burn my ass through traffic to glue it to a desk for ten hours so that everything runs smoothly.
So the raise I’m supposed to get will barely fucking cover inflation, but god fucking forbid it the company tries to bump someone’s pay by more than six percent, red flags all over HR, upper management raising eyebrows, who the fuck is this guy that he needs to get this much of a raise anyway? Oh that fucker. The one who’s highly visible, seems on the point of boiling, but channels it into multitasking his way into a corner, then getting himself and five other people where they need to be to see eye to eye on whatever project they are working on. Oh, but I did start at ten bucks an hour, driving a fifteen year old car that I didn’t take enough care of to make it last, and here I fucking am bitching and moaning about how much some guy isn’t paying me, knowing full well that if I don’t abort fucking mission soon that I’ll look up, age forty, wondering where my chances went, discounting my dreams to write fucking stories on a boat off of San Luca or something.
Who the fuck has time to read books anyway? Who the fuck, from mine and subsequent generations, who is fairly fucking hep and has some form of social life, sits down with a book and reads the fucker from cover to cover. I myself start wavering at about page thirty, start getting fidgety, looking to see if there’s something else to do. SO WRITE FUCKING THIRT PAGE BOOKS, SELL THEM TO FUCKING KIDS ON CAMPUS WHO WANT A QUICK STORY, FUN AND EXCITING, OR SADDER THAN ALL HELL, THAT WILL LEAVE THEM WISHING THEY HAD ANOTHER. Or just broadcast your idea on an anonymous webpage, hoping that someone will think “hey that’s a fucking good idea” and make a mint.

make the mint yourself, goddammit.
Make it. You got straight A’s in grad school while not even enrolled, can write like you breathe have endless imaginative qualities, and the discipline and drive to do it.

Lay it all down. Fuck cubeland. Write about how much it sucks, about the office romances about the simmering almost-fucking that accompanies two opposing bodies in the brief encounter while passing the printer. It’s fucking hard, but it’s hard that is fun. Why waste your late twenties slaving for the Man. Fuck that. You want to be forty with a bad back from sitting on shitty chairs all day finally in some management position? I don’t think so. I don’t think the holy fire burns for that young man. I think that the passion is sapped by the mindless drudgery of cubeland. And so the fuck what if you take snippets of pieces of others’ work and bind them together into a story. Do you think Shakespeare came up with all his shit on his own? No but he had genius, and genius lurks, at the edges of the mind, in cohorts with his good friend insanity.

FIN ...X