Chapter 49

49

“My words, over time, began to fray like the ends of an overused piece of rope. A writer’s mind is a narcissistic landfill of cluttered words and phrases that continually pile on top of one another until the entire head is filled with incomprehensible nonsense.

That was why I wrote. I needed to remove some of the layers of verbiage and get them out for my own private piece of mind. One they were placed onto the page they had found a new home for themselves and would no longer occupy space in my brain. Writing a novel is a wholesale swap meet. A yard sale of the mind where everything must go…and all sales are final.

Writing was my catharsis, a way to reasonably remain sane, yet fortunately people began to connect with my work and I was able to earn a living while maintaining my mental clarity. However, like every flowing river, eventually there became a blockage in the flow.

It happened after the accident. All of a sudden what came naturally for me just stopped creating itself. I’d spend hours…hell…days alone in my office staring at a typewriter whose keys had become cold from neglect. Frustrated, I turned to the bottle for inspiration, which eventually pushed me over the edge.

At first, while I was drunk, I’d feel a trickle of creativity and my fingers would stumble across the keys, forcing words into sentences and then piling those into paragraphs. Then drink would overtake me and my body would wander away from my desk and back into my ramshackle of an existence.

The next morning, my mind arid from dehydration, I’d read over yesterday’s drunken ramblings and find that the words I’d pieced together the day before were simply refuse that my mind had discarded to appease the demon growing in my soul. After a few short weeks, I had hundreds of pieces of paper waded up and littered on my office floor. I thought that leaving them there would remind me that my words had a purpose, but eventually they just became an obstacle on my way to the toilet.

Eventually, what had started as a clog developed into a full-scale dam and in the state I was in, those words filled the reservoir much quicker than one would believe. A neurotic narcissist has no business carrying around all that clutter. It chews at you until, without any form of release; it begins to eat you alive. So, to answer your question John, I write the words to heal, to survive, and to maintain some sort of normalcy. Once the words stopped flowing, so did my existence. A writer who can’t write has lost his ability to define himself, and that my friend, is just as good as death itself.”