As Hard as Stone
2003-06-04 � 4:22 p.m.

Firstly, just to get this out of the way:

I'm going to see Le Tigre on the thirteenth!

I am understandably excited. My groove, so often locked deep within me, will probably escape. Look out, fools.

---

We're gonna retreat now, all the way to Saturday night, after the bar closed and I was sitting conversing with Dimitri in the darkness. This is after everyone else went home, but before I myself came home and had to call the police to break up the party my neighbors were having next door. (Which, by the way, I did as a last resort but with a bit of malice — if they would have answered the door when I rang the bell, over and over, we could have had a conversation about the appropriate level of noise for Sunday morning at five a.m. Since they chose instead to laugh at me through the door, I felt no option remained to me but to summon the local constabulary. Oops! Did I tell the police I was worried because of shouting, thumping and the fact that no one would come to the door? Well, it's not that much of an exaggeration.)

Dimitri was talking about his allergies and how they had caused him to get a bloody nose while riding his motorcycle that day, which led me into my story about bleeding for an audience, which led to talk of college, and then Dimitri asking me what it was I studied while I was in college.

I always feel like I need to do at least two things when people ask me about my college studies: firstly, I have to clarify that yes, Literature and Creative Writing are two separate and distinct majors, but that secondly, they shouldn't assume that I am any good at either of those two things just because I managed to get a degree with those headings. I suppose that my impulse to address the distinction between the majors is related to the latent guilt I feel over having gotten both degrees, because while yes, they are separate, they also share so many requirements that is silly not to get both if you're already going for one. I suppose that the University is ultimately responsible for this and not me, but I still feel guilty — it's not like, say, majoring in Chem and Bio; there's just so much overlap in Lit and Creative Writing it doesn't feel like I did enough work to rate two majors.

I'm so good at guilt.

I always feel the need to play down any immediate assumption of my abilities because (besides my low self image and my deep seated belief that I'm not good at anything, ever) the conversation almost always goes in the same direction at this point, one that quickly spirals out of my control. Firstly, people will respond with incredulity — whether out of some kind of dissonance created by the idea of me as a writer and how I regularly present myself in person or just out of the plain disbelief that anyone would major in anything so stupid, I don't know — and then the barrage of questions that assume that I am already some sort of failure:

"What did you want to do with that? Write for a magazine? Do you have a book you can't get published? Oh, wait...technical writing? Is that what you wanted?"

Or something, and no matter that none of those things was ever a goal of mine, it always makes me really depressed, because I have to admit that no, I just liked it, and didn't really consider anything past that point. This always seems to discombobulate people even more, and things rapidly break down from there. Plus I always start thinking about how I never really did have any goals with my writing, and no matter that I was never any more than passably acceptable at it, I felt like I got someplace, sometimes. Spiraling inward often ensues. So yeah, these conversations never go well.

I suspect that this is largely my fault.

But back to Saturday night, which took a little bit of a different conversation tack than usual. Dimitri, upon hearing that I had some sort of experience as a writer, immediately assumed that I was the person he had been looking for.

"You're a writer? Holy shit, man — you can help me! I need your help."

"I'm not really a writer, I just got my degree in it. You're trying to write something?" I was at a loss as to what this might be, which was foolish, I should have expected the answer I got.

"Lyrics," says Dimitri.

I demurred immediately, of course, because I honestly wouldn't know where to start. Lyrics are more often than not closer to poetry than to prose, and I've never felt even mildly competent composing poetry.

This did, however, lead Dimitri and I into a deeper discussion. He claimed that he must really be bad at writing because he was radically dissatisfied with everything that he produced, that he found it exceedingly difficult and that often the things that he thought were brilliant one day looked like utter trash the next.

I laughed at him, of course. Dimitri's background is much more in music than in writing, but I reassured him that these were normal reactions to writing, at least in a lot of the people that I know, and that I was surprised he hadn't experienced the same kinds of things when he was writing music. He said he supposed that he had, maybe at the beginning.

He asked if I ever felt the same way about something I wrote and I laughed again, thinking, if only you knew. But I said that of course I did, and that he shouldn't feel bad about having a hard time writing things. I told him that writing was hard, maybe one of the hardest things I had ever done.

And that stopped me, because I had said it without thinking, and I realized that I believed it to be true even though I had often claimed exactly the contrary.

After ruminating upon what this nugget of exposed subconscious thought might mean, I came to the additional conclusion that I am conflicted about the act of writing. This shouldn't be a surprise to me (or you), being as I am conflicted about so many other things, and because I quit writing anything even remotely seriously all those years ago because I had basically concluded the same thing though I phrased it to myself differently back then. Because writing is hard, but different parts of it are hard for different reasons. And some parts are easy, just like I always claimed.

For me (and probably many others), the easy parts are the mechanics of it. Forming sentences, choosing words...all that stuff is easy. Even an easy kind of readable style comes out of me quite naturally. All these things I attribute just to being a reader — I read enough sentences as a kid that I just kind of absorbed how to make a halfway decent one.

The trick is infusing meaning into those sentences — that's what's hard. And I've never been any good at that.

The problem is that the ease of the former tends to camouflage the lack of the latter. People assume that there's something going on that really isn't. I've had some minor successes combining the two, but they have been minor.

Because writing good things is hard.

So I quoted for Dimitri the Gene Fowler line about writing being easy, you just stare at the blank page until drops of blood form on your forehead, and he nodded solemnly, and that was that.

But it's still spinning around in my head, that conversation.

Now why would that be?

-t

Currently Aurally Inducing: Cibo Matto, White Pepper Ice Cream
Selection of the Lyrical Vocabulary: "But I can't fill in the blank."

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