Happiness is a Warm Pen

We all have our personal shortcomings. Even the most noble of humans are inherently flawed, and we all fail to live up the expectations of others, or even our own. For some it’s arrogance, for others it’s greed. And every once in a while it’s a mixture of poor judgment, bothersome neighbors, and a an unusually large collection of bear traps. For me, it’s spite.

Mind you, when I say that I don’t mean open hostility. When I use the word spite, I mean a much more passive-aggressive sort of disdain. For me, spite isn’t fueled by the kind of anger that will manifest itself in screaming matches or fist fights. Instead, it’s a quiet, brooding contempt that involves going to extraneous lengths to prove someone wrong, or at least avoid proving them right.

On the surface, I’m just about the nicest and most helpful person you’re likely to come across. But under the surface lurks a bitterness of Loch Ness proportions and runner-up vindictiveness. If you cross me, I’d never dream of setting fire to your house, much less telling you how I feel.  Rather, I’m more likely to smile and nod while mentally cataloging the imaginary possibilities presented by carbolic acid and a turkey baster until I’m far enough away to stop taking your phone calls and wear my hat in a way you wouldn’t like.

While I like to think that that my passivity is at least in part due to a sense of kindness and respect for others, it’s probably equally the result of another shortcoming: laziness. Ordinarily, laziness is a vice that I will readily embrace, not just as a means to avoid confrontation, but also as a way to avoid such tedious, mundane tasks as doing the dishes, mowing the lawn, or putting on pants. But I do tend to rue my laziness when I let it stand in the way of activities that I actually care about, like buying cupcakes, seeing films with breasts in them, or, most importantly, writing.

I fell into a very bad funk a few years ago which left me unable to write for a very long time. And as someone who has never wanted to do anything with his life other than write silliness with which to bother others, this felt like a rather significant loss.

While the personal melodrama has long since come to a close, its lingering impacts still haunt me, and I keep finding it difficult to muster the mental energy for creativity or self-discipline. It would seem that writing is the same as riding a bike, in that once you’ve stopped doing it for long enough you forget how the baseball cards are supposed to fit in the spokes and until that’s sorted you can’t be bothered with the rest. Occasionally I come up with schemes to force discipline and spark creativity, with bouts of occasional success. I’ve written a few screenplays, even if none of them are quite developed enough to try to produce or even show to anyone without prefacing by saying “I had been drinking very heavily at the time.” I started to workshop a grammar textbook recently, and while I haven’t gotten all that far yet, I at least know enough rules of comma placement to realize just how few of them I observe. And, of course, I started this blog. But as my regular followers would have noted if not for the significant handicap of being imaginary, I update this page just often enough to keep it from developing World Wide cobWebs.

But all that is about to change, for today I learned that someone far less talented than me is about to become far more successful. This this discovery has ignited a fire under my creative cauldron in much the same way that learning your ex has married someone more attractive than you might result in a sharp increase in the number of informational pamphlets on the benefits of plastic surgery “accidentally” left in your wife’s car.

And my assessment of our relative talent isn’t meant to suggest that I possess any. I’m far too self-deprecating to ever dream of suggesting that I am good at something. If I by some odd chance I ever found myself scoring the winning touchdown in a football match, I would probably respond to the wild cheering of the crowd by finding Jesus rather quickly just so that I could have someone I could give all the credit to.  (Either that or by running for the exit before stadium security realizes that the real quarterback has been bound with duct tape and doesn’t usually come out onto the field looking like he’s missed every practice since Thundercats came on.)

Rather, I mean that the hack in question produces work so frightfully atrocious that I wouldn’t even dignify it with the same status as my own self-loathing. There are people whose talent makes you jealous of their success, and then there are people whose staggering lack of it makes you ashamed of your own failure. And the knowledge that this work will soon be unleashed upon the world fills me with enough shame to keep an entire continent from taking its shirt off in the high school locker room.

I once read a very good line in a not very good book to the effect that the human spirit is a marvelous thing, and there is little that it can’t accomplish if it’s out of spite. I’m hoping this proves to be true, because today I let my sense of bitterness and (extremely relative) superiority prompt me to make a pledge to myself: I decided that I’m going to write for at least a half an hour every single day, no matter what. (More when possible, of course.) This will be no mean feat, as lately I’ve gone weeks or even months without working that much (as the quality of this blog will verify). While I’ve made similar vows in the past and consistently interpreted them with the same sort of leniency as New Year’s resolutions about exercise and personal hygiene, my aggravation at the state of the universe is great enough at this moment that I feel like I could actually deliver for once.

Ultimately, that isn’t going to be enough.  It is of course crucial to develop technical skills, and it’s generally quite difficult to be successful in comedy unless you’re genuinely funny or at least capable of working the word “fart” into sentences that no one previously dreamed of.  But equally important is the business of selling yourself to others.  I’ve never been particularly skilled at hustling, networking, or completing the sentence “I’m quite good at ______” with a straight face.  And if there is one thing that my recent encounter with someone else’s success has taught me it’s that knowing how to market your work is what gets you success rather than producing work that deserves it.  But, like everything else in life, self-improvement needs to be taken one step at a time, so I plan to start furiously pounding away at the keyboard until I figure out how to start developing professional contacts or social skills.  Baby steps.

Of course, there are better things to write about than how I should or plan to be writing more.  Assuming I deliver on my promises, at least some of my attention will be focused on updating this blog with a little more regularity. That is, assuming anything happens during the rest of my day that is interesting enough to write about. Or interesting enough to write about on the internet, anyway.

-TC