It’s 2am the evening of my birthday (or morning after, perhaps I should say) and I’m waiting for Dragon Age Inquisition to download, even though when it finally creeps towards 100% it’ll be too late to actually play it. Why am I doing this? I could not tell you. I am compelled by a vague dark obstinacy.
So I am sitting, and I’m thinking, and I’m groping around for words, and I think, it’s only a little past Tuesday. I should post that one poem the magazine rejected.
I open it up. I think “Man. No wonder they rejected it. This is fucking awful.”
Well, OK. This is terrible, and I can’t bring myself to put it up on my website, but there’s that other piece I found in a notebook not long ago that I was really proud of. What about that? I think it started as some sort of exercise about not using commas because there aren’t any. I liked that one.
So I open that. And I’m just. What is this. It is terrible.
Is it 2am sinking its fingers into my brain? Are these really awful, or am I just not in the particular mood for brooding shit without commas right now? Is this just self-doubt brought about by the inexorable passing of time, exemplified by this, my 30th birthday? How freaking long is this download going to sit at 96%?
These are the questions that plague me, my friends.
This is my normal way of thought during a night I am awake. I had a lot of sleepless nights in an almost empty university library somewhere in England, while I was not able to do anything productive and let my mind go to places I did not want it to go; opened memory drawers with thoughts that kept me awake. When it became light outside I walked home, grabbed a sandwich at the Tesco that just opened, ate it on the way and fell into bed shortly after, only to sleep into the noon-hours.