Man, I hate when you read something or come across something that makes you realize, "Man I really fucking suck."
I was just reading the Paper and there were two articles in particular that brought this home for me, one about a poet who lives in my town that just published a book about leaving the city to raise a family in Montclair, and another article about parenting blogs.
Why would these things make me realize I really fucking suck, well because they made me re-realize what a quitter I am, I use to constantly write poetry, but rather than working at my craft to get better, at some point in college I decided, ah fuck poetry, the only people interested in my poetry are women who want to sleep with me, being in a band is a better way to reach people with my ideas and feelings.
Now of course I didn't stop writing poetry & prose I just never worked at it any more, the first draft was now the only draft and I stopped showing it to people, it's not even like I got any devastatingly bad feed back, I just gave up the ghost.
As you obviously know by the fact that you are reading this I right a stay-at-home-dad blog,
and I've been doing it for a number of years, though I have ideas for it almost daily I have to force myself to post once a month, it's a lot like my ideas for bands, I'd come up with a concept, write four or five songs, demo two of them and be like, "ah no one wants to hear stripped down trashy blues punk, why bother continuing with this project?" Then two years later the White Stripes start making waves doing that exact same thing, and few years after that go on to fame and fortune. Now I'm not under the misguided notion that I have nearly as much talent as Jack White, but a band breaking big doing what I wanted to do just shows that there was interest in the world out there for it. And again, my band got some good reviews, but a combination of me being lame, and having an inability to focus on one artistic endeavor at a time ends up with me being an artistic jack of all trades, master of none.
So basically if I had three blogs instead of seven I might have written more entries for this blog, and hence might have been noticed by the author of the article in the paper, and had my blog listed in the article which would have lead to my blog getting more hits, and that some how would make me feel what? More valid as a blogger, a person, a parent, or what, why do I even care? I'm often confused where my healthy Buddhist/Taoist not giving a fuck about the trappings of life intersects with my unhealthy fear of failure, and what role my socialist desire to not deem myself a commodity and therefore not participate in capitalist society plays in it all.
Product is the Excrement of Action
1 comment:
I think you're ready to go back to grad school. You don't suck - being a good person and being a parent are two things you do exceedingly well. The idea that raising children or making emotional connections is classic patriarchal logic of the type that posits slavery as a viable economic policy. I think maybe we can't help but internalize that something is more important if it results in external monetary value (unlike Nordic countries who weigh the work of raising children into the GNP)or public acclaim (that sometimes substitutes for for money in our value system)...
Ah, screw it, i lost my train of thought because N. called to tell me about Sonic Youth. KT is gonna be excited that you posted an essay from her favorite writer, by the way.
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