Fecking shit. By James Hayes Over the last few days I could tell by the sunlight creeping into the room that I was awake at an indecent hour again. I lurched forward, still in a drowsy stupor, and scrambled around the floor to find my phone. I read the clock. Four am. I had set an alarm for six-am but I am now wide awake, feck this. If I am awake all are awake, why should I be the only one sitting up in bed as the rest of the family snore the night away. I promised myself last night. I was going to wake up with the sun and write something. Any damn thing would do– a line or two on the LinkedIn (Friends of Ireland page), then another on FB friends of Ireland and a few lines on my own page on FB, how many short stories did I write this year? I don’t know but they keep me going. But the reality was that I hadn’t finished the book I started late last year about my time in New York. Today was just another day so far in this year of broken promises. I opened up documents that I hadn’t touched in months. Some old auto-saved document popped up. The page was littered with half-written sentences – a smattering of disjointed false starts that hardly constituted a tweet’s worth of words. I chuckled to myself as I realized I now measured writing in terms of tweets. Now that sounded like a topic worth writing about, if I could bring myself to write in the first place. I convinced myself I had to shower before I could do any work. I took a writers shower, meaning I let hot water wash over me as I zoned out for 20 minutes. Long ago, I made resolution to meditate every day. I guess this counted as meditation, if by meditation you meant gazing mindlessly at a mirror. Fending through the steam of the shower, I dropped out of my day dream and back to reality. I returned to my laptop and stared at the blank document before me. It was like a virgin canvas. It was pure white. Like white light, it contained every hue in the visible spectrum. Within this page lay the entirety of possibility: the chaos of nothingness. In this moment, I was Shaw, Yeats and Behan. I was the divine force that brought order to the Cosmos. I was fecking delusional. It was getting late at this point. I could feel the glow of the empty, white screen taunting me. You can’t fecking write today. I bet you have lost it. Feck you computer, I knew computers were unable to make conversation. I have known this for a long time, but I never told anyone... I could have a couple of coffees. Maybe I could pop one into me to help things along. After all, it was a little like drinking courage with energy. But I was past the point of needing coffee. Right now, I needed a drink. Like the kind you drink at a party when you realize that the DJ is winding down, your attractive friends have paired off and left without you, and all you have to look forward to was a cold walk home. I needed that kind of drink. But I decided against it. People might find it odd if I drank at home and alone. That was the kind of shit that made people give looks of judgement camouflaged as looks of concern. Not there were any people around, so to speak. The only ones nearby were my family who all were still asleep up stairs. But I meant people in the abstract, nonfigurative People or Omniscient People. I had the words, but I was failing to put them into a story... I took a few exaggeratedly deep breaths, priming myself for the dreading task of writing. I was finally going to write something. It’s now or never, do or die. I wrote the first words that came to my mind. After months of writers’ block, they were the only words that felt real (whatever the hell that meant). I typed them with uncertainly, in case the friends on FB might take offense to their blasphemy. And so I started to write with the words: Fecking shit.
Posted on: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 19:29:08 +0000
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