Well hi. Chalk up no writing to my being a simp, buckling from pleasing all but me. I’m down. Writing lines has come too hard for this joker lately. The black dog of depression sat his ass on my head and died, so I’ve pulled his rotting corpse up around me. Fun, yeah? Who wants to write about that.
The last month of money drying up, trying to retire, endless thwarting of my non-existent publishing life, stressing in the psych ward with unstable kids, and caring for our own kid who is struggling medically and mentally, extinguished the flames of any righteous rage attack from Hotspvrre, to rage against kid’s chickenshit St. Olaf College for stripping a professor of his job because he hosted Peter Singer, Bari Weiss, and John McWhorter. It smudged my endless tracers or takes on inconvenient speech, on grievance, order, disorder, disability, and crime and punishment. Those are just some concerns.
One minute I tell you my brother founded Twin Cities Pride in 1973 just out of high school in Minneapolis, the next minute I’m huffing against Minnesota teacher licensing standards that impel new teachers to affirm all child coming out nonbinary or trans, or face what? the inability to get a teaching license, to be the one who battles ignorance and the stupefaction of the masses, and shows kids how to be good critics of information sources? who leads them to read, form better sentences, solve tricky math problems, and evaluate the quality of laws and rights? Why should a teaching license hang on affirmation of gender?
Why do they have to be so stupid?
I think the central bad guys to blame for my not writing is that I’m rassling the black dog along with backfilled and super sticky racist aspersions, my six and a half year Hotspvrre blog reputation, and those are just personal. The global climate for an old straight white guy to publish is shit. I’m way too comfortably cranked, apparently, into the hallways of power to deserve to speak at this point. If I don’t deserve to speak, even if I’ve never been heard, it doesn’t matter how saccharine or brilliant I am. Of course, it might help (no guarantee) if I owned my privilege and the “pain” I’ve caused others in making up fiction stories about poor kids, but nah, my existence has likely “unalived” so many for so long, it’s time I sat down, humble.
My uh, my mute button won’t stay stuck, though. I keep forgetting that I need to shush and let tiny oppressed intersections have the floor. Whatever I had to say lovingly or even attentively about urban kids’ need to grow and thrive, about inpatient kids in psychiatric care, seems buried under the avalanche of Woke Identity in every human resources office, and board room across the nation.
Maybe I don’t need the NYTimes, Fox News, or podcasters who interviewed me. Maybe there’s something loose, entropic, or ADHD about my tale spinning that makes me unquotable, un-airable, or an amorphous wonder to talk to. Well, talking is overrated. When there’s a theme in my tales, it’s always a job for me to clearcut to riprap and type my way into it.
What should I do? I think I’ll go back now to my stories. Fricking abominations, they are. There’s also a novel from 2017, but that thing — hoo-hah, what a mess. Novel for National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo), or novel-on-a-stick. That’ll be fun. It’s around here somewhere.