Two very simple rules. a. you don’t have to write. b. you can’t do anything else.
-Raymond Chandler
When you can meet what you dread with a smile on your face you will truly love who you are.
-Belle Leever
Good Morning. It’s 8:59PM on Thanksgiving night and gloriously quiet. I’ve got a knot somewhere in the gut of my heart. It’s kept me from posting here and from a lot of things. It’s a bad fear. I’ve been unemployed 2 weeks tomorrow. Why I’m not off and running and doing everything I can for the career has got to be fear but like I said it’s in the gut of the heart–somewhere betwixt, hard to get a bead on and impossible to work around. Working around was how I wrote for the last 10 years. Saturday mornings and Tuesday nights, a couple-two-tree hours here and there when I wasn’t bartending, driving a stakebed or working as a lab tech at the homeless shelter. A good 5 years of the last decade I wrote in the morning while working as a live in caregiver. After I got my Boss out of bed, showered and fed him I’d hit the roof with a pack of cigarillos, a hot flagon of instant espresso and hash. Now that I’m sober everything’s become easy and that’s what’s so hard. I’m inured to my own blues. Nothing’s dire which makes everything feel like it is. I back off from the hard edges because I know how bad it can get. I don’t want to wake the sleeping beast of my own critical mind but it makes these days without a day job soft as a smothering pillow.
The first quote above is from America’s finest writer. The second from my first true love. The years that have passed since have made me strange. I am somehow more me but completely different than the 23-year old hardcore kid and budding alcoholic who fell in love with her. Chandler’s writing is bracing. It’s whisky. It’s brisk. It pulls you along. He became a writer after losing his job as an oil company exec, at forty-four during the Great Depression. Tonight is the kind of quiet I hope for every day sitting here, at the desk–by the window cursing the kids or their loud uncle and worst of all the blower and Mexican construction crew. I’m so mad at myself for finally having this quiet, all this time and free money but only squirreled away in fear and anyway unable to look critically at my own material. We whittled the anthology down to 67 posts and I can’t tell, I either love or hate my work. I’m too close to it and so I keep my distance with marathons of TV drama. I sleep late and write a few lines, post on social media and drink coffee until I have a headache, jerk off and take a nap or talk on the phone. This post is for shit but these are the annals and this is the proof. I hate the place I’m at creatively but I can’t shake it. Oh yeah, the economy is as worse as it’s ever been and a quarter million people have died from a pandemic. It sucks out there and it sucks in here. This post about writer’s block is over.
THIS DECEMBER FROM YELLOW LARK PRESS
KEEP BLEEDING IN THE ANNO FINEM:
10 Years At Going For The Throat
Going for the Throat 
As you told me to just draw…you know what you need to do.
Nobody can make you do it but yourself. Social media is a double edged sword. We need it to make and keep those connections (especially in this time of social distancing,) but it keeps us from doing the hard work.
Thank you Friend. Luckily I don’t find myself in this place often. Writing my way through is what GFtT is all about. The only thing less fun than where I’m at creatively would be blogging about it but that’s also why. We don’t just reach for the sky, we have to keep pushing up the floor.