Quiet Doldrums of an Artistic Mind

I get my best ideas from life. Doesn't everyone? I have been writing professionally now for seventeen years, and I have yet to produce anything of consequential importance to myself. All though my readers seem to love it, as well as my editor. What can I say? I have a gift for the understated.

They said I was going to be the next Hemmingway, and in a way I guess they were right, but I would have settled more for a next Hampton Ross. You don't know who he is. Don't worry, that's the point.

I left the double doors to my publisher's office complex at exactly 1:12 p.m. It was on a Thursday. I never go too early, or too late; this fact, like every other thing I do is quite predictable. Lately, I have been attending a weekly meeting (on Thursdays) with my publisher. I cannot even stand to read any of my own work, much less revise it. I leave that up to him to toil through. His name is Mike, and unlike me, he still enjoys his work after nearly twenty years. I guess what I am trying to say is that I don't believe I have the stomach for this business any more.

My latest novel was rejected because it was quote "sadistic cruelty". This surprises me, however. At this point in my career I could submit a VCR manual and have it published. Most authors write because it brings them fortune and recognition. The only things that it has brought me are ulcers and personality disorders.

Surely you have seen my face at your local library or perhaps even on your own bookshelf. I find it amusing that I could possibly be looking down upon your normal life at this very moment with my lackadaisical grin spread across my face and my widely recognized turtle neck sweater. I envy you and your normal life. I would gladly give away all of my millions for the chance to die unknown. Perhaps that is a little too extreme. I would simply settle for the chance to walk to my mailbox without being thwarted.

My birth certificate says that I am Jeffrey Vaughn. It sounds more like the name of a movie star than a writer, I know. Perhaps that should be my next venture. I know my name has enough pull to do it. Perhaps I will, if not only to raise my notoriety from that of the five and a half inch still likeness of me that you have pressed firmly against your tattered copy of Catcher in the Rye. I could then become the ten feet tall looming presence moving back and forth before your drying eyes in a dark theater somewhere.

See me now; composite stone and marble, spewing forth my liquefied tranquility from my "O" shaped mouth into the pool of serene truth. I collect my wealth from passerbys tossing coins at me to grant their wishes. But who will grant my wish? I have no coin of my own. Does anyone have a penny for my thoughts?

Perhaps I have a tendency to think too much, or converse too little. Whichever it is I know that I think somewhere in between, but my associates don't seem to notice. I say associates because I cannot honestly call them relationships. Somewhere along my road to success I seem to have lost the familiarity of this concept. That was the reason that led to my abnormal novel submission. I simply don't care any longer. I fear that my common practice everyday demeaning conversations with "normal people" have broken the switch in my brain so that I find it hard sometimes to determine between which people are really stupid and which people really have something important to say.

I try not to let that bother me. You can either be the amusing or the amused. By following the impression and normality of those around you, you will become nothing more than an ornament for their amusement. So I rightfully choose to be the entertainer. That is what I do after all, isn't it? Entertain? I suppose I should learn to accept my chosen place in this world sometime or another, even if it does make me as miserable as I am. I find it peculiar to think the only possibility to gain happiness is through misery. Perhaps that is why no one is happy, but it is the sacrifice that has to be made to be successful. You have to let it make you miserable like another Van Gogh or Edgar Allen Poe to be successful, because the world is a melancholy monster that devours all the pain and suffering it can without being touched by its own.

After I left the office, I came home, not that I had much desire to go elsewhere. I rarely leave the house, especially on the holidays. I have no family, no close family, to come visit me. My holidays are usually spent dividing my time between smoking and drinking. I am the conventional picture of Americana; the typical coffee and cigarettes artist. Except in my case you can substitute coffee with Tangueray and Tonic.

That is why I am the way that I am; like an unstable wineskin that is sometimes filled with aging wisdom, and at other times so fragile that I could break and spill my insides all over the ground. I have become a lot more fidgety. I cannot stay still for extended periods of time. That is why it has been hard for me to focus on my writing lately. You haven't heard from in three years now have you? And you were wondering why. Well, now you know. I've also taken on certain obsessive-compulsive attributes. I wash my hands religiously, so much so that I have had a hand sink installed in my study where I write.

It is not an uncommon event for me to go days without sleep. I try, believe me I try, but I just cannot get my eyes to close. I stare at the ceiling recounting the square ceiling tiles above me. There are 432. That is why I keep a modest supply of eye drops on my bed stand, next to my TV guide. I don't even have a TV in my house, and if I did it would not be in the bedroom. It just makes me feel somewhat normal, to have a popular item of consumerism near me as I sleep.

I suppose I have let it all get to me too quickly. I feel a bit paranoid at times, though my head-doctor says that I am sane. "It's just a figment of the imagination that you let run rampant at times because of what you do." My life should make for an interesting autobiography. I can see the beginning of my memoir unfolding as the pages turn:

Do you ever get that feeling that someone is looming over you, watching you from over your shoulder; someone that you really dislike and would avoid at every open opportunity? With their hands outstretched towards your throat and their hot breath raising the hairs on the back of your neck, you find them increasingly more developed and annoying. I cannot explain it. This is how I live my life.

Perhaps it is only myself looking over my own shoulder. Maybe I have given life to the personification of my self-criticism and loathing. Could it be, the evil shadows within my soul united into a single entity to destroy the good. Must I face him alone? Should I leave him be? How is it said? "Maybe if I don't move he won't see me."

Somehow I laugh to think it possible. The real question is could I stay motionless, statuesque, avoiding the confrontation I know I must face forever, or at least until I finally do turn into a stone persona of myself?

Unlike common classics like that of the literary juggernaut Moby Dick, I have no one to depend on to immortalize my obsessions. I am telling my own story.

Then again, who is to say anything about my life is interesting. I am more likely to be a subject of study in next year's psychology textbook.