I am a god damn hack as a writer!
It shouldn't be this easy to distract me! It really shouldn't. I should be able to wake up first thing on a Sunday morning and ... boom!! Nothing but net, baby. Nothing but 5,000 words promptly right off the bat. I shouldn't have to .... feel so sunken like I do. To feel so blocked, and clogged, and as though I just don't have any ammo anymore. I shouldn't have to feel so bloooooody addicted to Twitter , and to YouTube, and all the rest of this shit.
Yet I am, aren't I? Yes baby. Its sad but true. I have to ADMIT it now. The moment I break my addiction to one thing online, or on this insufferable iPhone, the next thing starts. In December 2016, for example, the big problem briefly became the old game EverQuest. I for some reason made a random return to it, and played every chance I could get for almost 2 months straight. My daily word count, as you can imagine, plummeted during this time.
Like, I went from writing 2-3000 words daily, if not far more, to suddenly just ...nothing. Totally blank. A word processor that, at days end, would have little more than 2 measly paragraphs in it. Maybe just two fucking sentences. "The wizard turned. He looked at the dog. The dog was...."
It was pathetic as hell. But then, a miracle occurred: My computer mouse broke out of no where, after I accidentally spilt water all over it, and I just never went out to get a new one, because it's shockingly comfortable to use a computer with no mouse ,believe it or not and...then EverQuest was done. I didn't need it anymore. I couldn't play it, in fact, even if I wanted to. It's such an old game that it actually can't run with Windows Mousekeys it turns out....
So then I was back again!! Inside my Notebooks. The months passed joyously, all the way from early February to literally the very beginning of the summer. I was on an absolute writing roll, at least the way I remember it. I felt accomplished; and I got a lot done every chance I could. I believe this blog shows some of the effects of that. Short stories, essays, the usual meandering attempts at novels, everything. I was secure in my steady daily word count! Yes!!!!!! (even, of course, if sometimes my word count was,I'll admit, just dirty sex stories...)
Then of course it happened again. The word count killa. Twitter. Yes. This was my first round of Twitter, in fact. I had been trying to follow my sweet Azealia Banks, the female rapper from Harlem, and by far the most controversial and political female rapper there has ever been, when I learned, via her Instagram, that she had started using Twitter again. Azealias Twitter usage is rather famous and I had done some readying on her "legendary" period on the platform (it eventually ended in her being banished permanently, on that account) so I knew I had to follow her this time. I had to try and make an attempt to actually, like, get Azealias attention. So , for the first time in my life, I made a Twitter. Azealia's fault. She drew me in. In fact, the handle of the account was even dedicated to her: "Azealia e' La Reina". Spanish for "Azealia is the Queen"....
Very quickly of course I came to see that Azealia could only keep me so occupied on there and I began to look around elsewhere. A favorite writer of mine, a science fiction guy called William Gibson, he runs a Twitter account too, so I started to follow him, and all the decidedly liberal shit he posts. Eventually I got caught up in "Threads" and conversations I had never even realized were occurring online . I became interested! As I said before in my post about Twitter, writing on there feels much different than writing on here, or in my lonely word processor. Writing on there feels like I might actually be read--like I'm writing for a magazine!! So I started to develop this dual interest between retweeting and discussing liberal politics, and then too also trying to maintain my now public love for Azealia, on my quasi fan account. At one point, I am proud to say, I actually even got a great deal of attention from Azealia, too. For example, we briefly discussed her desire to live in Maine one day , we discussed some Civil Rights history, gun control stuff, other rappers of course, she at one point visited my page and liked a photo of a book I took (the book was about polytheism), and then ...
Then I lost my mind, at some point, and decided I just had to log off. I could not take it anymore. First of all because I knew, the entire time, that Twitter was sucking tons of writing juices out of me (I was trying to write a story about a wizard), and secondly because it was making me really really upset with some of the arguments I was getting into on there. I wrote about one of them before a few months ago, the Colombian girl or whoever it was, from Washington Heights, that I got into a fight with over Madonna being a "cultural appropriator". I still feel my blood a'boiling when I think of that bitch. She sort of humiliated me at one point and then publicly made a scene of blocking me (when I really wasn't expecting it) and so then I knew .."its time to go, baby...its time to go..."
Later that day I promptly deleted my account and then waited, patiently somehow, until Twitter complete;ly deleted it a month later (since they have a waiting period in case you want to return). Oddly enough, I'll add, Azealia Banks also deleted her account not long after. Which I found kind of odd, and don't want to believe was at all connected to me deleting mine ... I mean she's sort of a star after all, but I dunno...it did seem, at times, like I was the only fan account she really had going for her ...(which made me sad). She has since restarted it two or three times, then deleted it again as recently as last week, but on her last restart I noticed she did post a new video for her song "Escapades" which is very good and I suggest you watch. (Part of the fun of summer 2017 was watching Azealia drop the demo for "Escapades" in real time on Twitter; as well as the finished release of "Chi Chi" which has no video).
ALAS!! Once I was logged off and the damn thang was completely deactivated, it was as my reader might guess: I was joyously back to writing a decent amount again, in my complete dark New Jersey attic solitude, back with no distractions, and I rode out the rest of the summer and the early fall of this 2017 with no Twitter and no EverQuest. The only thing that really threatened me was a 3 week period where my piano tried to resurrect itself and get attention to make YouTube videos; but I stabbed that pretty quick... to get back here...to the silent page.....the silent page where I am convinced, if I can just truly focus eventually, all my success will be found. Real deep and lasting success. Every word I write..essay, short story, or even just this... every word, I believe and have faith, brings me closer to that success. Yesterday I almost got something...1,148 words...a black femme rapper who gets sucked into a sort of Wizard of Oz type scenario...she met an elf sorceress named Magmorel.... 1,148 words...it was halfway decent...there was also a pirate involved...an idea that had bubbled up to me whilst in the shower and I rushed to write it ....
Yet ..yet...yet... as I say: The Twitter bug somehow jumped out at me again sometime around the middle of October now ,and it has gotten me pretty bad this time, just like last time. It has taken over my mind. I find myself entirely unable to disconnect around the clock. My brain is bleeding. All my precious thoughts get plugged in there, instead of here or elsewhere. I find myself obsessed with seeing who starts following me and who retweets me, who likes me, and who is actually kind enough to reply to me. I did a bunch of shit the first week I was on so, like I said another day on here, I have almost 2,000 followers. On the Azealia fan account I had a measly 120 or so. Now I got 2,000: I am in this SHIT!!! Also of course, beyond that, I find myself obsessed with just finding and learning about the truly strange people on there.
For example, the other day I wrote about how I was discovering that black girl from Atlanta, Georgia, the hair stylist. Well, I find I have tired of her now, the same way I had sort of tired of Azealia's account the other time in the summer, and now I have taken interest with a new character. It is another black girl of course (my reader can see I have a thang for 'em) and she is not from Atlanta but, supposedly, if she is to be believed, Florida. She says she lives right at the tip of it, in fact, and in one status she posted she wrote how her father was a "dreadlocked rasta from Kingston". I found this fascinating of course! As I have been doing my obsessing over Jamaica a good bit recently.
But ah, this girl...the "Queen of Ghana" she calls herself on there... she is truly fascinating, and very beautiful! Very, very beautiful. And she writes a great deal of very interesting stuff and a lot of it, too .. To the point where sometimes it can be hard to keep up. I log off the damn Twitter for one hour and when I return she has 6-7 new statuses for me to scroll through, many of them quite long. She says a lot of risque things, sort of like Azealia, that always bring a smile to my face. The other night for example, she spent 2 hours typing statuses giving "advice" to girls. Most of her advice revolved entirely around a handgun and how to use it when a man gets a little too aggressive. She said something along the lines of "...and if a man ever tries to really fuq with you and I mean, like, really, like he hits you, my advice is always...fuck it, shoot him."
This was shocking but fun to me: As a writer I am very attracted to people and characters who speak bluntly like this, especially in these public forums -- there's nothing better, even if the subject is risque as this. She then later wrote about how she has a daughter named Jaslene and the daughter is only 4 or 5 and she said how "...I don't ever let Jaslene outta my sight round here... i don't let her go play outside...if I go out there with her..y'all know I got the burner on me..tell y'all the truth, I even got it on me, in the room, when we are sleepin..." This of course created a very strange image in my mind, and I begin to really try to imagine what that scene must be like. It sounds dangerous, of course, to be sleeping in the same room as a young child with a gun on you but ... well, it is the way of this world is it not? Certainly the way of this country. Plus maybe she is just exaggerating the whole thing and it isn't even true eh? After all, in another post, she did say she still lives with her parents, and she mentioned how they work the late shift together or something like that ..... she said she was 24 years old. I guess she seems 24...
Ah! The Queen of Ghana. One wonders what made her choose that name in particular. One also can't help but wonder exactly what this intriguing Queen of Ghana thinks of me. As I said, I have liked a very wide number of her statuses (not many people seem to) and I have also been brave enough to reply to a number of them, at times with full paragraphs, in fact. She seems to often have a lot of questions she posts , for instance, about transgendered people. I am not "technically" transgendered myself, considering I am sitting here with no breasts, a penis and a full Jack Sparrow goatee; but I have the profile photo on Twitter as Azealia Banks right now, so who knew what this girl thought. I thus started to try and discuss trans people with her .... she didn't reallly seem too enthusiastic...I used my usual line about how it's all "just science ..and anothr invention we have to accept with time..." She came back with something about how "...a few months ago a tweet of mine went viral, with trans ppl, because I wrote how if they get to be called real women, then I want to be called a trans woman...and they flipped out on me..they went totally crazy.."
I told the Queen of Ghana that I personally take no offense if she wants to call herself a trans wioman; in fact "I find it complimentary that you would want to align yourself with the community in that manner." The Black Caribbean Queen ...she had no response to this ...none at all....for she was already eagerly writing about something else. Probably dicks. Oh, she does a lot of talking about dicks. From what I have come to learn of her these past few days , this woman despises men very much, but men have dicks ... and by God, she loves dicks. The girl from Georgia was sort of similar, she even had an intriguing phrase posted as her Twitter description: "I ain't even like men; I'm just programmed to fuck 'em." I love it! I really love it. Indeed the Queen of Ghana posts very interesting statuses revolving around the male phallus. Also she posts many about the female genitalia. Her descriptions about how wet or not wet her pussy gets are always particularlt fun for me. "Niggaz think they sooo hot , think they got real long dicks... ahahaa....these niggas aint made my pussy wet in years now. My pussy stay dry off these niggas for real. Its like these niggas done forgotten how to get a pussy wet or suttin..."
You see, however, dear reader? See what I mean? About how horrifically distracting this rotten thing is? I really can't stand it for this reason, because it's like a book of some kind that I'm reading, but then again, at the same time, it isn't a book. What the hell is it? It's Twitter. It's distracting. I cannot seem to control my usage ... but I feel ...I feel deeply compelled to keep trying to learn how to control my usage. I feel I have no choice. Literally everyone is on this thing. In fact, I was retweeted yesterday by another rapper "somewhat like" Azealia Banks, except a male whose quite older, Talib Kweli. He is very active on there as well, it seems, battling "trolls" for hours and hours on end. Beyond Talib, there is also Joyce Carol Oates, the old writer. She is on there just like William Gibson; both of them post constantly about Trump, liberals, gun control, healthcare, etc. I feel like I am supposed to become a part of all of this, if I want to one day succeed as an "American writer" ...I feel like, if I was courageous, I could even send the link of this blog straight to Joyce Carol Oates and she could read it and save me from starvation (if I was lucky and she "chose" me) and yet.... and yet .....like i said ....I can't really control my usage. At some point I always spin out of control. I talk about things I shouldn't talk about. I say embarassing shit that would make someone like JCO not want to choose me, eh?
Like when I start talking with someone like the Queen of Ghana, about dicks. Which, yes, I did that, just a few hours ago. She wrote about how she had a grandfather or something who was actually a Christian priest of some kind in Jamaica, and she said how she thought he probably "prayed to keep demons off of me...but they don't wanna leave....the demons make me want to suck dick..." I read this statement the Queen of Ghana posted in complete awe, and of course I immediately and I mean immediately replied that I have often felt exactly the same. For it is true! Just like her, I have often felt that my entire desire to be a gay queer, and to perhaps even be a trans, was all some sort of demon deep down inside me, trying to wrestle control of my soul...my body. So I wrote someething like "...my god..queen...its xactly how I feel, girl... the demons be my only friends ...they tryna force me to suck dicks... Im like yo cmon...they insist..." The Queen replied back promptly with "...well don't forget mami, the demons aint always bad, in fact sometimes demons is angels and so on y'know?"
Needless to say I am clicking back over to Twitter now to see if she has posted any new statuses.....
Shockingly, and sadly, she actually has not. It seems the Queen of Ghana has gone silent and now been silent for about 5 hours, so since around 10 PM last night (its 3 am now). The last post she made had to do with her baby girl and how she just wants her to grow up in a good, healthy place. Presumably she won't post anything else till tomorrow ... in the morning....when I'll eagerly begin to read it all again. I wonder if I will eventually tire of her like these others. I wonder who I might move onto next, to keep me occupied ,if anyone at all. I keep sort of expecting that eventually, if I just use Twitter enough, I might erase the desire I have ... and adjust to a normal, non addictive usage.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be the case. It seems like it might actually wind up being the exact opposite: the more I use, the more I will keep using. I honestly don't know how Joyce Carol and William Gibson use it so often and still get writing done, assuming they do. He is sometimes awake even at hours like these, up there in Canada where he lives, posting. Then again, those two were both born in the 40s...and their best work is preumably behind them.. I really do sometimes think about trying to desperately plead with one of them, in the comments under their statuses, to read my shit, read it oh PLEASE READ IT! But I never do it. I didn't even do that with Azealia Banks neither, and trust me I've written a lot of stuff in regards to Azealia. I have no courage though. I also am convinced that I would ruin something "special" about my self if I wer to reveal myself like that, to these people -- especially someone like her. For some reason I feel like I have to be "hidden" in the shadows at all times. Even when I go out walking the pitbull now, I always walk her in the shadows.... I cannot stand to be SEEN...I really hate it ...when we walk the main road and the street lights shine on me...I shake....
I do wonder though, I'll admit, about what it would be like to have some sort of "alliance" with an artist like Azealia or someone like her. Like, William Burroughs , back in the 50s, he teamed up with Jack Kerouac to collaborate on a book called And The Hippos Boiled In Their Tanks, and I have always thought that was just so cool. So imagine if I somehow , by some fucking lucky miraculous stretch, got someone like Azealia to collaborate with me on a book - chapter for chapter -- she writes one, I write one?? What the hell would the book even be about? Who knows-who cares! So long as I was collabing with Azealia man .. that'd be incredible. Of course it would never happen, me no think, for what reason would a bad rapper bitch like AB have to collaborate with an unknown, unpublished, totally obscure scribbler like me? I feel that releasing a novel would actually look bad for AB, considering that scene. Sad .. I dunno... why am I talking about this?
Time to log back onto Twitter and maybe start jacking off. I got a whole new bottle of KY Jelly here and .... well, to be honest ...I got a whole other secret account too.....
PORNOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
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