My seagull is broken. It's been broken since three days before Christmas and when I say broken I mean dead and when I say seagull I mean soul. You have to read that explanation with literary whimsy and a poetic license. Without enough literary whimsy it literally translates to my soul is dead, which pretty much means that I am dead and my corpse is doing all the typing here. (This would be unfortunate because by the time this phenomenal post broke 100 hive rewards my body would be too badly decomposed to cash in.) As for the poetic license, you can obtain one after a 20-hour education program and passing the poeticians bar exam.
What's that? Sure, go ahead. I'll be around. Just sitting here. Rotting...
You're back! Judging by that shiny new poetic license you have in one hand and the joke we just beat to death in the other I'm guessing you're ready to understand what the fuck it is I'm going on about with the whole broken seagull thing. Well I hate to break your heart, but I have no fucking clue. What's worse, I think I could have come up with a better response than some pathetic I have no fucking clue (read in a snotty voice that indicates I'm making fun of myself) but in this stream of consciousness I am little more than a hack and a suckerfish that steals tones and ideas from other sources and remodels them to make it look like some little half-grey girl genius sitting on her catpiss couch in Portland has reinvented humor writing.
It's ok if you're not following this. I've been lost since you left to get your poetic license. Feeling a little better since you got back, though. But the seagull's still broken.
Well, I'll be damned, that little bit of education and certification actually worked! You do understand me. You get it. It makes sense to you why after spending a good 15 hours of hammering out a chapter of my book under the performance-enhancing influence of one-sixteenth of a tab of acid that I should sit back and reread all that I've written and wonder who the fuck I think I am trying to say what everyone else has already said in the same tone that they have already said it. And why that would lead me to the conclusion that my seagull is broken.
My goddamn seagull, which really isn't a euphemism for anything other than the captioning of the image up top, which itself isn't actually a euphemism at all but a [catchy] title, and jesus christ you wouldn't believe how many typos are flying outta me right now and how off topic I keep getting from the topic of how fucking frustrated I am that the seagull is broken I am working on this fucking book about how I got out of The Suicide Pit and into I-Love-Life Club and writing the damn thing like my parents and a fleet of kindergarteners are gonna read it before I flip it into a script for a Disney movie. In other words, where the fuck is my damn SELF in all this idealized bullshit fluffy writing and why am I not being authentic to the woman who saved her own life? Why am I trying to make my writing sound simple and sane when it was the simplicity and forced sanity that nearly killed me a thousand times over?
Insanity. Smear the thoughts together with rambling poetry and all the metaphors and similes and smiles and mad cackles it takes to make the work of art that tells the story of me. ME! The Adventuring Crow Lady! None of this tired once-upon-a-time Point A to Point B organized sensibility that someone who has seen the inside of my apartment (when I'm not expecting company, I do know how to clean) would point at and say Ha! Bullshit! Farce! Fraud! and a stream of other redundant generalizations of how not me the writing is. Take that smeared beautiful and creative chaos and wave it under some publisher's nose (or eyes, that sounds more effective) and say looky here! I wrote this and maybe you think it's madness but it's MY madness and it's MY life and it's like nothing you ever read before...
Yes, I realize that doesn't make it any good... No, I did not almost get eaten by a polar bear in the Arctic... Huh? No, I'm not interested in adding that to the story to make it a better sell... Yes, I understand what it takes to make it out there in the creative world. Actually, that's a lie. If I understood I'd be making it, now wouldn't I? I'd be successful. A. Successful. Writer. Not Portland catpiss couch girl in her pajamas groveling to some imagined rep at a publishing company in a blog she wrote complaining about how hard it is to be authentic and raw even when nobody is watching.
That seagull is drinking water, by the way. He's not broken. He's just a kid. Kids do weird shit.
All pictures and words copyright Anna Horvitz (me) and cannot be used without my consent.
