One Long Sad Sentence

Why am I doing this, I hate this, I can’t focus and nothing has a point, oh I could submit to this place or write for that place, or go on a run, or look at someone’s Twitter and dream I have their life of writing lists for Buzzfeed by day and selling adorable but profane embroidery by night, or I could go to the fridge and get another Coke that would hopefully wake me enough to make me want to write because that’s what I want to do, write, and I may as well keep on writing because no one is going to do it for me, but how pointless is it to write if no one is reading your writing, and even if someone is, what monetary value does a bunch of sad words have, so I go and apply for jobs I am not quite qualified for but I know, if I could just get one of them, my life would be okay and I’d have money again and I could go to school and get my master’s in education while writing fiction that someday is canonized – as I remember Arthur Russell was not recognized until after he died – and my life would be so full, I’d have things to do and be on the phone so often it would always be buzzing and chirping, and that would give me so much happiness and neural feedback I would never need to write again, I’d be too occupied with my phone to do any kind of frou-frou art that in the end amounts to nothing because what is art, what is a fiction story other than made up situations which help no one, and what is a list about a 20something other than a collection of clichés 10,000 other people have written before, and what is satire other than a succession of supposedly funny words that have no courage, I would never need to write any of that nonsense anymore because I have seen successful people who’ve written words and called them “essays” and they are not half as good as my words I call “essays,” and they have written them for publications more prestigious, and so I think how, how did they get to write for those publications, because they knew the right people? but how do you get to the know the right people? by writing the right things? by moving to the right places? by having the right haircut? all of these things and more, yes yes, of course, yes, and so I sit and think, well, maybe I should submit one of my writings to a new magazine or online publication, and if they accept my work I’ll be introduced to a whole new set of eyes, but then I am rejected by them and I go back and post to the same place, this place, where nothing good happens, so there is no point, you see, or worse yet, the other publication or online lit journal accepts my work, but my story doesn’t do well and years later I go back and read what I wrote and think, well, no wonder, I was no good then, if only they took my work now, then I’d be a star, but I’m not a star, and so I look for jobs I will never get but I have to apply for because what else I am going to do? should I instead write nonsense that no one will read and have nothing to eat? should I starve? would I then be published? at least by applying for jobs there’s a chance I might get one of them, and one of them, by some graceful stroke from the universe, will not be so unbearable and it will give me enough money to buy things I want to buy and when I’m at the job it will not make me want to bash my head into a wall every few minutes, but I never get that job, because I don’t know any of the people, I never networked, because I hated it, and because I’ve been spending all my time writing fiction and thoughts for places that either don’t want to publish me, or will publish me but won’t publicize me, and because of that I have grown a bitter resentment toward the people in that industry, so I haven’t cultivated and nurtured the connections so as to lubricate my passage into the blogs and journals, and yet I continue, because I cannot stop, I don’t know what else to do, mostly I’m left with the option of searching for and attaining jobs in the menial, labor-intensive field which require no education, even though I have a college degree, but that degree does me no good because my degree is in psychology and nobody hires people with psychology degrees unless they are 23 and blonde and hot and looking for a job in marketing, none of those things apply to me, so here I am writing this stream of consciousness rant that will get me nothing and maybe put me further behind in the march toward my goal of becoming something other than a guy who works at random jobs and writes nonsense and helps no one, so I continue doing this, like I am doing now, stuck in this endless cycle of writing until someone reaches out a hand and either slaps me in the face and wakes me up or pulls me up and above it all, otherwise I struggle in the mud and fall deeper and deeper until the earth swallows me entirely, which actually doesn’t seem that bad.