Relentless Honesty

So I am in a quandary. As with all quandaries, it is ultimately one of my own making--or non-making.

There is a concept in 12-step recovery known as relentless honesty. It means telling on yourself--opening the doors you bar even to yourself not just to shed light on the icky stuff therein but exactly because doing so is uncomfortable.

My writing evolved as an adjunct to my existence. This is not so much the method I chose for expression as it is the method that chose me. I've grown to understand things about myself and about human nature that I want to get out there. Something about this shared delusion we're in. This was the way I could best express these thoughts I have.

I don't pretend they are important, not for a second. But they are important to me. And faithful reproduction of those concepts has been for many years a compulsion. Finding the most economical words has been something else which evolved as an adjunct to my existence. It's too easy to be verbose.

Poetry--or specifically unstructured prose--is what has evolved for this purpose. Now those thoughts for so long were the protestations and affirmations of love, affection and lust all spun together as Romance. I can spin that emotional yarn all day long, and I think I do it quite well--without it being schmaltzy. Because the feeling is there and true and intense and powerful. Superficial is easy, you see, and the aforementioned Romance is a drug, complete with the rituals and highs and crashes that you'll find with any addictive using.

So I got pretty good at it. I keep those poems around because the feelings were mine to feel and the poetry, like a hologram, is a pretty accurate representation of those feelings and the women who engendered them.

I didn't realize what these feelings really were until later, after I ran into addiction head-on. Then I got an inkling of the nature of my sins--in the Gnostic sense. Hamartia is the word for it. Look it up.

None of this is important, but it's important to me.

I write. That makes me a writer, I suppose. I never attach an appellation to what I do. A writer to me is someone like Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Harlan Ellison. Of course these men are products of another time, when writing as a skill was appreciated, or at least it paid by the word. I am not a writing fool, probably because there is no profit in it. Probably also because attaching monetary value to what I do tends to cheapen the pursuit, in my view. Probably why I am not a success in this culture.

Other than the fact that what I do do for money is almost completely joyless, I guess I am OK with this for now. Money is a means to an end, not the end itself. You might say it makes me a pretentious ass because I don't consider what I do a commodity.

I have learned a thing or two about a thing or two and I need to tell you all about it. It's not important, but it is important to me. The bitch of it is, were we telepathic you'd already know these things from me, or you'd have already told me these very same things. Fuck!

There is a reason for these ramblings, and I will elaborate on them soon. Suffice to say for now that someone has read these things of mine and has bestowed an honor on me. The honor has an interesting price, which I will elaborate upon later. For now, I wanted to clear my head of these things that bugged me all the way up a hill yesterday. Wanna see?