Everyone wants a something

Friday 8/16/24

I have to say that it pleases me that the greatest story ever written about a cat--which is "What the Mouse Knew"--was written by someone who hates cats and thinks that they're wretched creatures, and that the story is very pro-cat.

It's not like, "Here's an amazing story in which there is a cat or cats and they're horrible, or they're annihilated, but they're in there, so it's technically a cat story."

Nope. It's pro-cat all the way. In the most loving, aching, beautiful, stirring, wise, touching, sweet fashion.

Everyone else who writes right now, all of these MFA people, would never be able to understand how all of what I just said could all be true.

I look at the shit that these people write in their "fiction" and it's either gibberish where they're trying to be deep and instead sounding like some embarrassing seventh grader, or else it's just them, shit from their empty lives, all of which are the same. They're going to drop in some Yale, make a reference to some other shitty writer.

These people know nothing about anything, let alone the meaning of it all, what is behind the veil, what you must know and be able to show people in your work. They just changed the names of themselves and the people they know. That's all you did. There's your non-genre fiction in the world in 2024. And it's been that way for a long time.

Just as I see right through it every time. How dumb does a person have to be to be fooled by any of it? No one actually is. Hardly anyone but "literary citizen"/my-whole-life-is-a-fraud-Rob Spillman types pretend to read any of it and anyone who does read it is doing so for another reason than actually wanting to. It's for class because that particular professor-tool is friends with the professor-tool who wrote that shit, or they're striking that pose, or there is nothing else in their lives and they cling to shit like this, like reading this garbage makes them special or intellectual or devoted or something.

Everyone wants a something, man. As their "thing." Everyone wants a goddamn something. Look at all of the therapy-speak in society. You know what therapy does for people more than anything else right now? It arms them with bullshit terms that they then use to make more bullshit excuses so they never have to take responsibility or rally to action.

All of these people who self-diagnose themselves so that they can get their something. I heard a pack of idiotic women today outside of the Starbucks. "I have ADHD." "Really? Me too!" No you don't. Neither of you have it. You're not anything.

And that's the problem isn't it? Because everyone wants a something but no one wants to do jack shit. They don't want to try and work and risk and find out about themselves and power through the disappointments and adjust to what they learn and do what it takes to soar when soaring is on the table. Even learning that it's there--that opportunity to soar, with all that will entail--is a journey, and it requires brains and your heart and courage and faith and vision and honesty. Self-honesty. It means no excuses, and accountability.

And as for today's fiction writers, they're just there to bullshit each other anyway so that they can be bullshitted in return. There is nothing real in any of it or the subculture that surrounds and enables it.

Anyone else ever going to be real and stand up and be counted? Anyone out there? But you know what? I don't think there is anyone else out there. Not with this. I'm alone in the stagecoach. And I'm going to have to be the cavalry, too. Because no one else is going to come riding over that hill. They don't exist right now.

I worked on "By Water" in the mornings while the kids were here before rushing out to meet them. No story has ever been structured like this one.

Work on "Expect Delays." We'll see how it looks tomorrow. It made me laugh today. The head shaking, "You have to be kidding me" laugh.

Wrote an op-ed. Moved the op-ed. Wrote a feature this morning, filed it. Did five circuits of stairs in the Monument and 100 push-ups, walked three miles.