April 10th: Feel inspired

It was about time for another mid-life crisis. I'd postponed my last with moving countries, settling, and drinking heavily with my newfanagled friends. But what am I doing? What do I want? It's these questions that, while I writhe in my thought infested sick bed on my days off from serving social degenerates and saints (and never the twain do meet) coffee and sandwiches. 

I've always imagined an impressive life for myself. A life of travel and inhibition, where my stories were filled with dramatic and unlikely characters, filling the pages notebooks and reams of loose pages found decades after my sudden yet timely death by rhinoceros horn. Yet my living life, pre-humous to the incident with the land unicorn, I imagine to be just as intoxicating, raising statues of marble around the world to say I WAS HERE I WAS HERE I WAS HERE. 

If I were a dream, and if I were as motivated in the between moments as I am now, I would have done more with my days off this week than watch Friends and Brooklyn Nine-Nine and read Maya Angelou and book domestic flights and wait for phone calls and emails and the profit of ambition previously fulfilled to come to fruition. 

I admire goddesses, and gods. The god of Thunder never wondered what to do with his days, where he'd be in ten years, if he should save this £10 or buy the pizza (I bought the pizza). The gods never had to be adults and make adult choices. They'd behave like children unsupervised in a department store, wreak whatever havoc they felt inspired by, and continued their life in whatever direction chose them. And they get to do cool tricks like ride goats and make things disappear. ffs. 

x

September 10th: books

I've just spent the past 9.5 hours editing my favourite and worst book. I'm either going to die, cry, or pop a beer and eat pizza and Ben and Jerrys in the bathtub. I haven't decided yet. 

It's only been two years since I wrote the first last words of How to go to Hell in 80 Days, and twenty minutes since I wrote the 8th last words of How to go to Hell in 80 Days. I've lost so many chapters from bad file keeping, and so many jokes that are no longer politically relevant. I love my characters, and I love tormenting them. I love how they squirm and fight back. But they're not good people. I'm worried people will think they're good people. I'm not looking for another Atlas Shrugged situation. 

I still don't know if I want a beer or a nap. 

October 26th: In the beginning

The truth is: there is no such thing as truth. Our lives are subjective and facts are only facts depending on how, when and where you were born. Villains can be heroes; mighty victories, shameful defeats. Love can be love from one eye and cruel from another. Who you are now and who you have been define your 'truths'.

These are my truths.

They're a little strange, yes, fucked up, quite possibly, left of field, for sure. Can you really expect any more from someone who spends 90% of their time in a world they created with people only real to them? Of course not! I'm crazy, insane, certifiable even. Hell, I'm a fucking writer.

This blog has three (3) titles:
Hops, Scotch and Chocolate: How to Aggravate Friends and Alienate People: A Writers Fable.
I'll be the first to admit that it's, arguably, a little much, but if you can't have your way with the internet, what can you have your way with? Even with it's pretentious, grandiose pointlessness, these are truths - they're my truths. It's what I love, what I do and what I learn (respectively). This is me.

If you leave me today with nought but a thought let it be this one:

Writers are fucking nuts.

I mean seriously. We spend our day and nights murdering people, torturing them and taking away everything they love. And we get off on it. So if you know a writer, be warned, because writers are fucking nuts.

I have a theory about this, actually.

Any and all Creatives - writer, actor, artist, musician - hop between two worlds a million times a day. Sometimes they leap far enough and return to the real world, sometimes part stays behind; and sometimes, most of the time, they don't push off hard enough, they leap, they fly, the sink, they fall, deeper and deeper into the gap between their worlds. This is what makes them so fucking nuts. It's quite hard to climb out of the Mariana Trench once you've settled in.

My theory involves these two worlds and the gap between .

The Real World / Your World: rent, taxes, social lives.
Their World: characters, conflict and control.

Your World is full of dangerous, uncontrollable things. Your body can betray you, your lover, your friend. You can find yourself from hero to zero in a blink and visa versa. This is the world where everything comes to an end. In this uniquely definite realm people piss on each other, break thing and drive each other to hell and back. It's beautiful.

People do things they hate for people they love; they break mirrors to see the beauty it hides. People kill, laugh, hurt and survive. I don't think you can quite capture this, not in words or pictures. It's a feeling.

And yet you can see it, and you have to. One day this Real World of yours will disappear and take everything with it - it'll take them one day, them and Their World.

This is why we have Their World.

Some of us are born with a gift - they can see the beautiful things, the tragic. And they tell us about it, show it so the rest of us can see. They show us so we can know what we're missing  because our eyes are so glued to our reflections in our fractured mirrors.

I'm not one of these people. I'm a different kind. Where some see where magic is, others see where it could be. We cast aspersions on the chaos of the real world and escape to our own but these writers, artists, musicians and dreamers are really just fucking nuts.

I mean seriously:
Q: What colour is the sky?
A: It's fucking green. A dragon hatched from the roots of an old gum tree and farted the first mosquito. Now the sky is full of their tiny green bodies, biting, sucking, scratching.
Q: Mosquitoes aren't green.
A: They're fucking green.

Never trust an artist to do the expected. Because they won't - of course. They don't know how.

In Your World you just ate a giant burrito without dying, in Their World they just stopped a mass murderer from killing the last unicorn and taking over the planet.

Can you see? Do you understand? We're freaks, hypochondriacs, drama queens and divas. We're doctors, magicians and astronauts, politicians. We're tragic, but we're fun, broken, unexpected.
If you're unfortunate enough to love one of us then please, grab something sturdy, because we will drag you into the hole in which we live.

Because we're fucking crazy, and that is a truth

LBH.