living with literary regrets (or: feeling behind)
"back and forth through my mind, behind a cigarette"
behind and never to catch up. at some point, i must accept this fact: no matter how many books i read, no matter how many stories i publish or literary magazines i launch. cheating time is impossible, it seems–fretting about the past doesn’t grant a wormhole back to the 1990s where/when i made my choices–not necessarily bad ones, but choices all the same.
choices which led me to here and i suppose i shouldn’t complain. i could be dead like my best friend; i could still be in georgia or dc, rotting away with women i’m too scared to leave. i could be dead like other depressives unable to defeat the disease, or use a medicinal fazer (set to “stun”) to at least mute the illness, those bluesy days dredged of color like gray films.
so many books i’ve never read, so many words i still can’t pronounce or spell without spell check’s help. what i know of craft is what i’ve gleaned from how-to books + the literature from my favorite writers + practice-practice-practice.
i missed out on something, i think, by dropping out of school. certainly a journalism degree would aid me now as i stumble through the daily duties of an editor. i’m too anti-social to miss the college parties, the tipping of bottles and the carefree fuck parades. no, i missed out on reading and writing–falling in love with my art–outside of the real world. is that even possible? am i idealizing something here? maybe. maybe.
the only quality attached to “feeling behind” is the unwavering ache of stupidity. an inside joke concerning David Foster Wallace flies over my head; a bad joke is a bad joke, no matter the subtext, but i’d still like to comprehend and fake-laugh out of pity for the joke-teller, and not to hide my ignorance. this sense of being uneducated, of being uncouth, takes effect in my prose–or the prose i’m afraid to write.
essays, mostly. sometimes stories, but essays make me swoon because they stand firm, reaffirming the writer’s fluid belief in something grand or benign, but important nonetheless. i, on the other hand, stand for many things, though i have a lazy mind. i’m full of emotion; it fuels my work; it powers my reason for returning to the blank page; i have no desire to prove myself smarter…or right…but human. and important for that very fact. my meager human existence, eloquent and clunky at the same time.
i’m 30 now. people say, “you’re still young” or “you got plenty of time to go back to school” and they miss the point. that’s my fault. i should be clear(er). i attain agency over today, and mild influence over tomorrow, but yesterday is dead and frozen and out of reach as it floats capsized. i’m still young, but not too young for regrets. and apparently, not old enough to live life with them.
yet.
The number one rule for your set, to survive you go tto learn to live with regret.
damn i should’ve included that quote. you and Jigga are correct.
I have some “lost years,” too, man. Feel ’em when I contemplate what I still want to do, and see the young’uns there already, doing it, or ahead of me. Don’t you have a blogger here who’s like 20 or something, and writing about what it’s like to be in college?
I think it’s useful to feel your regret, to own, to let it wash over you in piteous waves. There’s something to be learned there, too, and it’s something you have that the young’uns don’t.
I totally feel ya, and I’m only 20 and currently in school. I think it’s a given that people can feel this way at basically anytime in their life starting in high school. I do all this literary-related stuff, but so many of my peers seem to know so much more about literature than I do. I try to not let it frustrate me, and just use it as motivation to keep pushing ahead, learning what I can.