Random Musings

I’ve read approximately three books in the last two years. (I mean visually. I’ve listened to many.)

The reason for this is absurdity. The kind of absurdity we enjoy, generally speaking, in things like Alice in Wonderland and Guardians of the Galaxy. I’m reminded of the power of absurdity and the need to embrace it by Chuck Palahniuk’s latest newsletter, in which he reminds us that we are all just goldfish in tiny bowls, waiting to die and be replaced.

I’m doing a terrible job of paraphrasing there. There’s a lot more to that story he tells, and tells far better. The link to his newsletter is at the end, and you should read it to get a better idea of what he said.

But his writing resonated like a punch to the kidney for me today. We’re away on a writing week, trying to work on the next novels in our catalogue. And I’m feeling like a pair of shoes thrown over an electrical wire. The ones that tell people where to go to get what they want. They’re not attractive and only vaguely useful, and only select people look for them.

As an author, that’s very much how I’m feeling right now. My last book hasn’t done nearly as well as I hoped it would, despite me telling myself not to hope at all. The book before that, and before that…same. Shoes over a wire. Some people were interested and came looking, then wandered off after their quick hit of story.

I’m a hamster trying to spin my wheel into gold. Apparently I won’t be writing the next great novel of any kind. I’m not built for it, I don’t think. As as I swim the gauntlet with a gazillion other writers trying to head upstream to the readers waiting to tangle with us, I know another writer-fish will leap over me, flash under me, and even if I make it to the readers who are left, after they read me, I will float to the bottom, wasted and empty, having given my all. But I was just another fish.

And you know…somehow his words have made me feel a little better as I carve pieces of my soul out and blink through migraines in order to keep the words flowing. I’m one of many, I’ll never get to the top, and so…pressure released. The game is one of absurdity, of trying to leave the gold fish bowl only to swim and die with bigger fish.

Life is absurd, and to expect anything but absurdity is to court lifelong unhappiness.

Chuck Palahniuk

And so maybe it’s time to sit back and enjoy the absurdity. To accept it, to let it make me laugh, to let the brain disorder that fails to allow my brain to, well, brain, simply add to the absurdity of the world around me. I need to see it as Alice sees it: too big, too small, too extreme, too odd…I too, can be too much.

You should check out Chuck Palahniuk’s newsletter, too. It might make you feel better about being an absurd part of our absurd world, in an existential, we’re all running toward death and trying to do it better than each other, kind of way.