maybe Leroy would approve

Just copying this from my notebook... I've been reading all morning; Ntosake Shange, Anne Sexton, Erica Jong, Taniguchi Buson... my brain feels fit to burst.

How do you write about how full of shit everyone is?
How do you write when it's all bullshit? All pretensious crap.
One form is as worthless as another. Poem, murder mystery, whatever.

How do you write rage and fear and depression? Why add more to the tangible world?

People are such a mix of beauty and ugliness (and who says which is which). How do you represent them with any accuracy?

Writer of angst.
or
Pollyanna Saccharine.
Just write about a house and the family in it but that's just 7th Heaven. The Brady Bunch. It's been done.

It's all been done and its all meaningless. There's nothing new and nothing ever changes so what's the point?

...

My imaginary audience pins me. Stabs me. Spears me. Strangles me. Every time. I begin, and thrust! --They thrust me back with their spear of disapproval, boredom, expectation, disinterest

We want Sex in the City.
We want a hero who's a loose cannon. Arrogant oneliners.

Don't give us the same old poem we've read a hundred times before.

Why bother writing another story about *insert anything here*
It's been done! It's been done! It's all been done before and there's nothing new under the sun
it's all gimmicks and marketing. Will they read it? Will it sell? No one wants to read about that
It starts out good but it falls apart. You can't keep it together
It's not believable
It doesn't work
It's too dull even to be awful
and everyone who likes it is just shallow themselves and being taken in by the glittery bullshit.

You can't trust anyone.
They're just impressed you wrote at all.

I came to the conclusion, in my darkest atheist days, that if all we have is this time, nothing after death, if we all die anyway and that's it--then all that matters is this time. All that can give life meaning--the only thing you can do that is worth anything--is to make someone else's time better. And entertaining them counts.

So why can't I just do that?

I am a reluctant cynic. I grasp at gossamer ideas--spirituality, butterflies as proof of beauty, orgasms as proof that my body is good, the existence of civil rights as proof that humanity is getting better, albeit slowly... I argue with the sense that nothing changes--I argue desperately. I struggle against the conclusion that evil will always win because good just can't compete without losing it's essential goodness... But in the end if I wrote what is raging in my heart I would be known as the worst cynic, the darkest most angst-ridden death obsessed poem, hopeless and mired in depression and fear.

And it's all been done before/written before, and it was done better than I could ever do, so what in the world would I hope to bring to the table? Who am I to write about a pregnant black member of a girl gang? My own life is so flat--I've read it over and over in my memory, in my journals, it's lackluster now, used up.

Ideas spring to mind and die even more quickly. Who am I to claim to be a writer? Who do I hope to fool? Why does anyone else think they can fool people?

But look at Anne Sexton. Look at the blood on her pages. She's not trying to fool anyone, or is she? How can you fool someone when it's really your blood?

Why can't I seem to find my own veins, except occassionally to write an angsty rant about nothing that even matters?

How do you go from there to a poem? To a novel? It's just scribbling.