Frank wrote last week on the undeniable influence that drinking has not only on our creative abilities as writers, but as artists writ large. I'd first like to commend him on a fine article, and having been made privy to his particular approach to writing now for somewhere in the neighborhood of a decade, I can attest to the effectiveness of his methods and their ability to produce quality prose, regardless of subject matter or motivation for putting pen to paper. It's a process that I myself clung to throughout my high school days, and into the early semesters of college. Writing things out on paper to give myself the sense of creation and ownership of the work I was producing was a crucial part of the process. Sadly, the demand for quantity over quality that so pervades the early years of academia, coupled with my increasing penchant for laziness, insomnia, and substance abuse rendered this critical part of the process too inefficient to cling to. When it comes down to it, it's a quicker, simpler, process to punch your disconnected streams of consciousness into a keyboard now, and cut, paste, rearrange, and edit later using the miracles(?) of modern technology. This article itself is being composed right in the browser-based blog editor, and I will no doubt be employing all of the electronic gadgets at my fingertips to render it as legible and coherent as can be expected of this type of endeavour (not to mention a man who's working his way through the bottom sixth of a bottle of Bombay Sapphire tonight). What's the point of all of this? Why am I giving you a lesson on the writing habits of two friends brought up under identical tutelage during the formative years of our writing evolution? The answer to that question is as elusive to me as it is to you.
You see, for at least a week or more I've been scouring the news, absorbing all of the information I could on everything from Pakistani/American relations to solar storms to why Iran should be allowed to develop the bomb to the world's fattest woman dropping one hundred pounds by having marathon fuck-sessions with her ex-husband. If it's been put into print or oozed onto the net by the waterheads that sell their souls for internet publication, I've at least scanned it in the last few weeks, and what I have found is that I have no idea what to even write about anymore. This blog, and my first few contributions to it, were guided by the principles of Blue Ribbon Radio: Substance abuse and behavioral deviance. How long, though, can we beat these into the ground? How many articles can I write about getting drunk and finding prostitutes or avoiding the mafia in European cities before they start to sound exactly the same? It would seem that the number is smaller than I would have liked to admit.
I ponder why this is, and I look at my approach to writing writ large. I'm no longer a product of my own drive and creativity... at least not completely. I cling to the habits I picked up in college and inevitably find myself punching out a page or two of text, reading halfway through it, hitting [command]+a and deleting every last fucking letter of it. These aren't just quick ramblings, either. They're thought out, hard fought paragraphs that I struggle through, and then at the first sign of displeasure, I trash it all to start over again. I've done it three times in the last ten hours, and am roundly convinced that the only way I'll get through this and actually publish it is to drink enough to enjoy the process and not care about the product.
I keep at it, in the face of the tedium and drudgery I often feel when composing, though, because deep down a part of me still wants to believe in my own creativity. As I've noted before, I came up, much like Frank, with a predisposition for academic excellence. He and I spent many years internalizing the same processes and experiences, and there was no doubt a point in our early years that either of us could have chosen to focus on writing and turned it into a career as adults. I chose the singular focus of music, however, during those years, and that led me to where I am today. That didn't pan out, as it were, and so I'm here in Bavaria furiously rapping these keys trying to get all of these thoughts out before I appreciate how mundane they may seem to anyone unfortunate enough to come across them.
That spirit, however... that small but nonetheless present spark of faith in our own ideas and artistic processes is what lies behind this seemingly (and very probably) fruitless enterprise we have undertaken here at the Blue Ribbon Radio Blog of Awful. It is unquestionable that the greatest literary minds of the last 200 years have been unapologetic drunks, misfits, ramblers, transients, and misanthropes. We don't entertain dreams of ever joining the Faulkners or Hemingways or Conrads of this Earth, but we do take a very personal delight in the fact that we share their experience regardless of the quality of our work. We know how and why they wrote, and we are enchanted by the same muses these greats worshipped. Modernity is an evil motherfucker in this sort of exercise, but we embrace it where we must and try to honor and respect the past for what it has inspired us to be. For good or ill, in us beat artistic hearts, and there's nothing quite as pleasurable as having the opportunity to express and share our inspired ramblings. As Frank pointed out, the booze is simply a relaxant to allow the creative process to flow freely, while drawing from the inspiration that music, love, sex, death, violence, and Batman (just to name a few most prominent sources) provide. We are not, and likely never will be, masters of this craft, but it is a privilege nonetheless to ply it for your consideration, and maybe even entertainment. As Chris and I have stated on air before, our ramblings, both verbal and written, are largely for our own cathartic entertainment... perhaps even more so than for our readers and listeners... but knowing that in spite of that, many of you enjoy what we do here, provides just a little bit more buoyancy for our ever-plunging souls.
Yours in sullen desperation,
Andrew.
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