Brain in a jar.

In response mainly to my desire to do something else for a living, I often attempt to sketch out ideas for non-fiction or journalistic pieces that could be sold to magazines, newspapers, etc. Within minutes, if not seconds, these sketches vanish from my mind, only to come back the next time I think about how much I dislike my job, only to disappear again, ad infinitum/nauseam.

Why is this? Probably because I really have no interest in writing jack shit that ain't fiction. I'm lazy, and don't want to research anything that doesn't interest me, and the odds are that if I'm taking money for something, it probably doesn't interest me (with certain exceptions, of course; proofing Len Bracken's work has paid in the past, and I thoroughly enjoyed it). But it's not really about the money so much as the fact that I'm intellectually and artistically lazy and selfish. If I wasn't, I'd be back in grad school by now, cranking out papers on William Gibson or James Joyce or Kierkegaard or heavy metal, or writing copy for an ad agency or something. Instead, I'm proofing the work of subliterates until two AM and writing novels that are exactly what I want to write.

I'd like to be a well-rounded writer, but I'm not, and that's fine. I'd like to be a halfway respectable author of incisive articles and journal pieces, but I'm not, and that's fine too. What I am, and what I'm fine with being, is a torpid scribbler of fictionalized obsessions and fascinations. Sure, I'll never receive any acclaim for writing about the stuff I do, and I doubt I could ever pen anything even vaguely perceivable as "important," but really, who gives a fuck? I'll let the academics do their thing, the journalists theirs, and the essayists theirs, and applaud them all. In the meantime, someone's gotta hold down the couch or the lawn chair in the driveway without resorting to folk-advice/nostalgia column writing, and that someone is me.

That said, I am rather ashamed of my intellectual impulsiveness and lack of focus sometimes... until I remember that, in many cases, I can hold my own in a conversation pretty much anywhere and with anyone. Christ, now there's a thought- Dave Smith goin' down in the books as a good conversationalist. Har!