it's possible

My dear Letter-Writer, Cary has hijacked your problem to ask us all for help. Tomorrow, he will apologize, I am sure.

Okay, Cary, your start-to-finish writing is just eaxactly like our quick posts. One of the reasons we post here is to see whether we can write quickly without revising. It'a a writing rudiment we ned to practice.

And, enough, Cary. Your response today is much too long. If you had revised and cut, your message would be clearer, and your patient would have better medicine. What the heck? You think you might be Kerouac or something? (Kerouac lied about never revising, though. I used to know one of his biographers.)

Anyway, dear Letter-Writer: Keep your good day job. No matter how hard you pursue your creative stuff, you still will need some day job, at least until Hollywood calls. Why not keep the good one?

Why do you feel so bad now? Answer: That is just how humans feel sometimes, especially humans in their late twenties and early thirties. It has nothing to do with your job.

Be a radical artist, but keep your salary, health care, and 401k. I myself have been a radical artist. I am great. I can play a Roy Orbison-style twist beat better than anybody else who ever has lived, including Roy Orbison's own drummer. But I ain't got much health care or 401k.

I am older than you. Please take my informed advice and experience into account. By the time Mick Jagger was as old as you are now, he was set for life. By the time Janis Joplin was as old as you, she was dead.

Cary's advice about "corporate" stuff is less than wise. Cary works for the Salon corpoation.

Available at Amazon.

Will explain many things.

May not solve everything at once, but will point the way.

Good luck.

(From a still blocked fiction writer who made a mid-career switch to become a performing songwriter...)

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

I couldn't resist!

I have a boring job that's secure with good benefits but I'm MISERABLE! I want to be CREATIVE, because creative people are COOL and SPECIAL and FLOAT ON A CLOUD above the conventional time/space continuum that ordinary people occupy.

So give me some advice...because clearly you know the answer to this problem.

You're where you should be all the time--but Carly Simon said it best:

You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you

You're so vain, Ill bet you think this song is about you

Don't you? don't you?

Cary loves to think that the corporate gig is draining (and writing for Salon isn't a corporate gig? Dream on, suckah!) when in fact, the LW has finally run out of steam.

I am intrigued by this writing style of yours. It is an interesting exercise, as are the thoughts you express as you write. I am sure that not all of it is a result of drug enhanced euphoria ;). Your insights have evolved, as your writing has, over the last three days. I am turning these in my mind as it relates to my experiences, which, in fact, are not at all similar to any of the LW of your column, and it is the disparity of the experiences that make the common thread (that is, your commentary) even more relevant to my own situation (which is more akin to mundane day to day living).

Anyhow, just thanks for your experiment. It is fascinating. Stuff like this is why I read your column.

Cary: you missed it, but this person is exhibiting all the signs of severe clinical depression. I'd get myself to a doctor and get some medication to help me out of a hole like that. It's amazing how things seem better when you can think better. Anti-depressants are like pushing the reset button on your brain chemicals.

I should have read the second page first, sorry I missed it.

Sorry, didn't T.S. Eliot work in a bank for years, and Kafka as an insurance clerk?

http://spurious.typepad.com/spurious/2008/12/the-threshold.html

December 12th. Five years ago (nearly five years ...) I began writing here. Five years ago to mark a threshold, the same one I'm marking here. Not to say anything. No communication. Except: it was possible to write. Except: I wanted to write and I wrote.

I'm sure Cary's reply to this really run of the mill problem was both profound and transcendent. However, at this time of the evening I haven't the patience to wade through 1,000 words of channeling (badly) anyone who has ever written on dope.

Believe me, LW, I do NOT advise this method of writing for publication. However, should you try it, let a competent editor (who won't ridicule you) intercept it on the way to the mailbox lest you completely sink your budding career writing the Great American Novel or some drivel for Broadsheet.

If you succeed you, perhaps, become the female William Burroughs. Or not.

In any case, I became fixated on this line from your letter:

"I just feel old, stodgy and upwardly mobile."

Oh to be, um, well if not old and stodgy, at least upwardly mobile.

My heart bleeds for you dear. You probably have decent health insurance too. Perhaps some of your hip, trendy friends who have started businesses are struggling mightily beyond your ability to comprehend. I should know, I opened an indy used bookstore last year. Good times, good times.

Anyway, as a former journalist and writer of the next Great American Novel, here's my advice:

either

1. Do nothing for awhile. Take some paid time off from your job, head for the beach, sip pina coladas, think deep thoughts and then the muse may return after you reset all your neurosis.

or

2. Plow through it by writing whatever comes to your mind and not worrying whether it will be good or not. It may be brilliant it may be drivel - you'll not know unless you commit yourself to finishing it. Writing poorly, most times, is better than not writing at all, except in journalism. Eventually the kinks work out and you get back into a creative groove. Something about getting back on the bike, I think, comes to mind.

In any case, and this should go without saying, measuring your life (which many of us down here in the real world would trade your for in a New York minute) and those of your friends is a sure ticket to crushing depression.

Lighten up. I'm sure with your past life experience and super cook friends there are plenty of things for you to write about.