The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

I have lacked discipline.
I am 36 years old and have discovered that my life has passed me by.
I don’t really know what to do about this.
I fight the thought that I am a failure, but by all accounting methods that I can think of, I am.
I have written no published novel.
I have spent two years in college, gaining a writing degree, yet have not been able to find a way to make it pay off for me.
For this I am sure that I am truly not bright.
I live at my mom’s house and work at the supermarket.
Anything I have written sits either in a drawer or in shambles waiting for me to edit it, a task which I am hardly up to doing anymore.
What is this slow turning away from responsibilities of life?
It is like I am allowing everything to fall away beside me.
I am turning off the energy, not wanting to create anything anymore, but am simply letting it all fall, waiting for myself to die.
By doing this, by looking and knowing that this peripheral stuff which I thought was so important can and will fall away I feel cheated, like everything I have done has been for ego’s sake.
For this I feel even more lifeless because it presents to me the question of what I could have done instead or what will I do instead.
It seems to me now that everything is vanity.

Modern society pretends to have the answer.
It is a steady flow of excitement just above our heads like some golden ring that if we try hard enough we are sure to snag.
I do not want the ring or the flow.
It seems evil.
If it wasn’t there we wouldn’t be living in such desperation.
I am unfortunate that my family believes that this flow is God.
If I choose to live among my family then I must too believe this.
It is not up to questioning.
I must worship the material and ever strive to translate my inner world into monetary prominence for this is the fruit of the flow.
If not I should move away to another community that does not believe in this.
I feel in my heart that this is what I must do, but for now I must pay allegience to my family, for if they are to die in a wrong minded thinking I must also sacrifice myself, at least to some degree, until I know that they are alright.
But I will not stay forever.
There will come a time when I will despise the sounds of my fingers typing away rationalizations into the night and I will steal away, leaving behind the businesses, the schemes, the chains that ask me to stay until I find a way to a final bed, the proper, fitting place for me in their minds, anyway, since my getting away would mean that there had been an escape and they had never found it.
Should you deny your salvation for your own brother?
Your soul for your family?
Jesus said that he came to destroy families, to tear them apart.
I believe I am almost ready to be torn apart from my family.
I find I rarely have anything to say anymore.
What I do have to say comes out in bursts after days or weeks of churning inside of me.
What poetics I possess come from out of necessity.
There is always a need for poetics when writing of discontent.
Without poetics we would not know why we write.
Poetics allows us the freedom to discover the nuances inside of ourselves. Poetics does not seek the dollar for it’s first prize.
It seeks to uncover, to release, to expel and to relate.
Poetics demands that our words have substance just as our breaths demand that our lungs receive oxygen.
It has no brain to tally scores, to consider fames, to collect money.
Poetics uses just enough words to convince the writer that there is something happening inside of him when all seems lost, when all seems dead or dying.
The disadvantage of poetics is that sometimes we attempt to stretch its purpose. We don’t know when to stop.
We think that if we are in the flow of the words passing on to the page then we will stop some sort of existential predicament, we will transcend our troubles like escapees up into a balloon, only we fully don’t expect the balloon to ever return to the earth.
This is the trouble with poetics.
We write and write and write and it feels good to write so we write and write some more.
Once we are flying we notice how small the troubles seem to have become.
We write some more and relish in the fact.
We write some more and suddenly, we realize, we’re bored.
The balloon starts to come down.
We don’t want it to so we write obvious wisdoms, stupid sentences, philosophy that tilts.
Then we come down, we step out of the balloon.
We are still human.
We are still mortal.
We are still very much disappointed in these facts, and our problems are still there only we have the memory of those few moments when we believed that they were not.
One thing I would like to say is that the English teachers in school rarely talk about what you must sacrifice to be a writer.
This is not to say all writers pay a heavy toll to follow their “vocation.”
But it should not be denied that many of them do.
Modern studies have shown that writers tend to have higher rates of mental illness.
It should be shown to students that writing is often a place where those who need therapy go to in order to heal themselves.
Students should not be given the idea that writing is a vocation like any other. Few people will ever find that they can support a family either financially or emotionally with the temperament of a writing artist.
Storytellers are a different breed as are researchers.
I am talking about those who stay with their words, pain themselves over their creation, their meanings, why they should be putting them down at all.
Students need to know that writers live the inward journey.
This should be a warning.
Unfortunately, this will not scare away the introverts in the crowd.
We only find such warnings exciting, that is, until, like me, they are 36 years old, living at home, without anybody to love them, no real job or prospect of career, only pages and pages of philosophical rantings that will most likely disappear with their own dissolution.
That’s a heavy sentence and a good place to end.

I’m sure somebody has used the title “notes on myself.”
I believe I have seen it somewhere before.
I am almost certain of it.
I woke up again today with a little inward sneeze that is either sleep apnea or some sort of allergy.
All I know is that it has been almost of week of the same thing.
I’m exhausted all of the time.
It’s amazing how hope is.
The nature of hope is that one day you have it, or know about it, and the next day it is gone.
The question about hope is whether or not to believe it when you have it and whether you should act at all when you feel that you don’t.
I am alternatively hopeful and not any given day.
Some days I look at what is on my plate and despair and other days I look at it and am happy that there is so much.
I hate the sound of the keyboard this morning.
It sounds like somebody chewing food, the food sloshing around between their tongue and teeth just before the wet, slurpy gulp.
I had a dream tonight of a librarian who said that the university has some sort of problem simply by virtue of it’s grand reputation worldwide as a learning institution.
Of course, I wondered what she meant, but then the crowd got too big, we were shuffled into it and by that time I’d seen my friend K.K. who had been doing some acting and I told him I was thinking of getting another part.
I was too busy networking, but K.K. didn’t care, didn’t really want to help.
I then got the realization (or I read it) that you should get your bit parts from the “hapless” stars of the production anyway, as if that is their responsibility which I know it isn’t.
A paragraph contains a single idea.
I have a lot of single ideas, but I think I have been rebelling against the paragraph for many years.
This is because I believed on some level that within every idea there are a thousand other ideas and I didn’t want to give the slightest impression that those invisible, unsaid ideas did not exist.
I think I want to use paragraphs correctly again.
If I do then I will be able to get to all of those ideas one by one.
Maybe it’s time for me to give myself a break.
Nobody is getting the inference of my rebellion anyway and by the time they do writing will have changed completely or the entire world will have been operating on the same conception in a different form, most likely technological in nature, for fifty years.
I will wake up an old dinosaur with an idea whose time had come fifty years before and scream “Eureka!”
I think the favored writers are the ones whose philosophy consists of adapting to their environment.
It is a pleasure to read the thoughts and musings of those whose day to day consists of wrestling demons and putting them in their place.
Twain was such a writer.