"One day I will log onto my website from a cybercafe in Marrakesh..."
I am a passionate person, and given to outbursts of enthusiasm, and of creativity. I become bored very easily, and these two poles are a
toxic combination. I am driven to create things, and I am driven to walk away before those things are finished. I am in this respect a serial adulterer of words.
I have therefore decided to turn my website into a Wiki. I detest the word
Wiki. It is a shitty word. I have had a website for five or six years now. It serves very little purpose, for me to have a website. I no longer work as a professional writer, paid to write for money, and it is no longer impressive for a person simply to have a website and a personal domain name. Even when I worked as a writer the majority of my website was superfluous, because my
CV is not linked from the home page. "
It is no longer impressive for a person simply to have" is clumsy, I know that, and you know that. My writing is like my love, in that it is passionate and expulsive, but it is also imperfect unless money is involved. I find that when I re-read my amateur writing from the past, the only pieces that work are those that were either edited by others or those that are short or that meant a lot to me, and thus I treated them with extra-special care. I am otherwise slipshod, and I skimp the editing process, because I am like a child with a
new toy. I do not want to sit down and have lunch, I want to play. And if that means that a lot of my writing is drivel with a few kernels of brilliance, then that is how I am as a person. A lot of my writing on
Everything2 is drivel, but that is because it is free. I am otherwise both brilliant and disciplined. I put the disc into disciplined.
My
website will therefore become a
Wiki. I will be the only person who can edit it. And I will edit it without pause or remorse. Currently it is a complex procedure to edit my work. I have to write it and upload it and shift it about into the correct directory with Linux and this takes time. But a Wiki is instant. I can edit my work live, from any location
on Earth. One day I will log onto my website from a cybercafe in
Marrakesh, and I will edit it from there. A young girl will be sucking my cock at the time, because
the people of Turkey are unselfconscious about public displays of affection. The possibilities are endless and the future is cloud-free. I will enter a new age of wonder and my writing will become something for the ages to cherish even moreso than now. Nothing can stop me and my heart sings with enthusiasm for this
beautiful future of
culture and sex. But there is doubt as well, because I can see where this is heading. I will simply create a greater problem for myself.
The cycle of ecstasy and despair will repeat itself. I will climb
the highest peak, and then I will fall into the
valley on the other side.
As
a consequence of the process of turning my website into a Wiki I have become wracked with doubt and self-doubt. The design of my current website pleases me. It is simple and timeless and it is today just as brilliant as it was five years ago, an eternity in internet terms. I will have to translate this design into Wiki markup, or start afresh. But what reason is there for my website to have a pleasing design? I am not trying to
sell my skills as a designer, because I have seen how hard it is to design a website, and that kind of hard work dismays me.
As I re-read my
old writing I feel dismay and disgust that I allowed such unrehearsed
crudity into the world. And sometimes I stumble upon genius and I feel joy that it was all worthwhile. But I lament the fact that my writing will always be crude and unfinished, because there will always be a future version of myself filled with scorn for the writing of the present-day me. No matter how much I edit, I cannot achieve perfection, indeed there are times when I can barely attain readability. It is
ferociously hard to write something that is entertaining, and I have a further disability in that I am continually tempted to play with the format and style of writing. I am too often
Talking Heads when I should be
The Ramones. My writing is like my day-to-day self in the real-life world. If you want to know what I am like, study the form of my writing. Not the content, because I do not mean what I write. I can fake meaning, but I cannot fake form. It is the goal of a gentleman to attain effortlessness, and I have tried to attain effortlessness without expending any effort. But what good would it do to attain perfection? I am never going to rock the world with my words, or bloat my bank balance.
Perhaps if I had a speech dictation system, I could write and edit more quickly, and effortlessly. Or perhaps if I had a special plug-in for Word that could juggle my words about, I might stumble on greatness. Will I simply edit my writing into blandness? I also dabble with music, and I have exactly the same set of feelings when I listen to my old tunes; except that my music is more internally consistent than my writing, in that the few good tunes I have produced please me all the way through, whereas my writing varies in quality from paragraph to paragraph, and from sentence to sentence. And, just as frustratingly, I believe that some of my music is objectively of a high standard. I have heard a huge range of music and I know I am shrewd. I can distance myself from my work. Too many people cannot do this. They see greatness in their own work that no-one else can see. Not because they are lying, but because they cannot perceive a dividing line between their inner thoughts and the outside world. Their internal narrative spills out and colours their perception of
objective reality. I have analysed this phenomenon and I try very hard to perceive things as other people perceive them, or as a robot devoid of feelings or memory might perceive things. It is important to
explode the self.