1187 Unterwasser

"By the time I was fifty, I gave up on my dreams." -Marty Stark's dad.

"Painful to live in fear, isn't it?" -Leon from Bladerunner

My kidneys are fucked up again. Back on the strict diet, and there goes yet another part of my life that gave me some semblance of pleasure. I feel fatigued. I could sleep fourteen hours a day if I'm left to my own devices, which I am. Life flickers by very quickly at ten hours a day.

The doubt is back. Maybe that's part of the post-project blues that comes out of the uncertain future, a mixture of the dread of going back to being a lawyer or the dread of not finding a gig before the reserve runs out, and of the despair of thinking about not making it as a writer, of being fifty and still puttering around life, jumping from contract gig to contract gig. Whatever this apathy with a slow simmering fear is, I think about the last novel I wrote and want to just give in and give up.

What keeps me going at this point is nostalgia and anger. I've been listening to shoegazing music from my college days (Chapterhouse's song "Pearl" on repeat) to remember those days when all I had to worry about were finals. To center myself on that feeling of being outside myself when I listened to a wall of sound. And as to the anger, it's an anger against futility, a rage against nihilism. What is the fucking point of this life? If it's to earn money to eat and drink and fuck, that's just not enough. I am not a fucking animal. I can fucking reason, think beyond today, imagine something other than eating and drinking and fucking.

Fuck this noise. I do know that if this novel doesn't pan out, there will be another. And if that doesn't work out, there will be yet another one. I'm not going to be fifty and telling myself I gave up on my dreams.

"Strength and Beauty destined to decay
So cut the rose in full bloom." -"Love Like Blood" by Killing Joke