this isn’t writer’s block it’s a brain fog that refuses to lift brought on by lack of sleep which is itself brought on by a little boy 2 ¾ years old who wakes up each morning promptly at 6:45am saying hey daddy hey daddy hey daddy which is sweet and all but i haven’t gotten the necessary 8hrs of sleep in a couple weeks now as my wife navigates her way through phd finals and is up late working each night and so i spent saturday working on this column with a plan to finish it monday night but i woke up monday morning just past 5am and couldn’t get back to sleep and so last night was even more delirious & scattered (i just now had to right-click on my attempt to spell delirious after two failed attempts i spellchecked the fucker) but of course once i got to bed, even early, i’m thrashing & restless and so the cycle repeats and so i’m now jacked & peaking on coffee & cinnamon donuts from kroger $1.50 for a box of 12 and while i don’t have the mental strength & alacrity to organize all the trout fisting in america works in progress: cops, meritocracy, disney, guns, fathers, with additional dozen or so topics to cover in the future) it did occur to me this morning just how tired it seems everyone is and we’re always expected to be working or thinking of working and it reminded me of this book i read a couple of years back put out by verso called 24/7 about how capitalism’s rapacious need for ever-increasing profits has seen the concept of ‘work hours’ to keep expanding both in the amount of time stores are open and the amount of time we, particularly we americans, are expected to work i mean i’m old enough to remember when they repealed the blue laws in massachusetts which prohibited stores from being open on sundays (and always remember that new england had its own religious fanatics centuries before the bible belt even existed) and how our era’s obsession with more more more is making us all work harder and driving us as a society fucking crazy i mean i’m not even getting paid for this shit it’s just an idea i had to probe our society from about 50 different angles and in the end have a book that most likely no one will publish but i can add to my own psychic bibliography or something to somehow justify my existence and temporarily hold off the feelings of ennui & pointlessness & non-self-existence that threaten to consume me from time to time i’m three donuts in now and threatening to spill god how i wish i had insomnia because the only person to blame then is yourself and it’s much easier to live a life consumed by self-loathing than the irrational loathing of others (more irritation than loathing to be honest) but then most of my life i’ve been able to find time to do both because i too am consumed by the disease of more and my artistic endeavors are fuelled as much by the desire for financial comfort as the desire to make great art but that’s a subject for another post but i guess what i’m saying is all of us are trout and all of us are fisted and some people believe that it doesn’t hurt so much if the first tearing you apart is wearing diamonds and some people dream of smaller or more gentler fists but life is pain and the pharmacy is always open good luck & allah bless & may trump have mercy on our souls can you even fucking imagine
Scott Creney 