Post by TOBIAS SAMUEL MAYHEW-COHEN on Dec 16, 2010 14:22:42 GMT -5
TOBIAS SAMUEL MAYHEW-COHEN
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TOBY , 26 , NEW YORK CITIZEN ,GINNY
Okay so it’s just gone two in the morning and I’m up writing. I know I have something to write; it’s in my head, just waiting to get put onto paper. Or pixels, really. Word processors are a goddamn god-send, I’m telling you. Jesus, it’s a good thing I don’t have to write everything down on paper. I’d be screwed. I’d get through like three notebooks a day to write it all down. Though that might be a reality soon; if I can’t get some money together I might have to sell my laptop to pay the rent. There are always internet cafes, but still, it’d suck. It’d seriously suck. It’d suck more than a leech trying desperately to get one more meal from a dead man’s skin.
Wow, that was dark. But kinda good. I need to use that in a book. Maybe DI Dunstable could say that. Or was I calling him Spiegelman? Whatever, it sounds like something he’d say. Still, that’s kinda messed up; I’ve been writing that character for ages and I still can’t decide on a goddamn name.
Jesus, I’m blaspheming a lot tonight. If I was back home I’d probably be several thousand dollars in debt to the swear box by now. Although, does ‘Jesus’ really count as blasphemy? You know, since I’m Jewish. Technically I should think that Jesus was just a guy. Just some historical guy, like Shakespeare or what’s-his-face, that French guy. Napoleon. Can you imagine taking Napoleon’s name in vain? Like, ‘Oh, Napoleon!’, or ‘Napoleon dammit!’. I don’t know, maybe they do that, in France or something. I should ask Isaac, he’d know. He knows everything like that. I swear he probably didn’t even have to do an entrance exam to get into Harvard, he probably just showed up and they heard him talk and knew right away what a smart guy he was. I know he probably seems way smarter to me, because it’s pretty clear that I’m the dumber brother, but I swear that guy somehow landed every smart gene in our family’s gene pool.
That being said, there were a lot of smart genes to go round. Grandpa Sam, the neurologist. Great Aunt Rachel, the philosophy professor. Uncle Benjamin, the writer. Ah well, maybe I’ll take after him; I mean, he writes historical stuff and I write mystery novels, but a writer’s a writer. That said, being a published one would certainly help, and I mean with a proper book out there on the shelves, instead of just the odd poem.
Which brings me back to my earlier point; the need for some dough, and by extension the need to actually write something, I mean come on, seriously, Toby, how can you have a head so full of ideas and still be so far behind on your book? That’s why I’m typing this up right now. I’ve gotta get these ideas out in the open, before they go, before I lose them forever. Even ideas about leeches and blasphemy and Napoleon and all kinds of crazy shit like that. Sometimes it’s like I’m not even the one thinking those thoughts, I’m just the head they happen in. I’m just watching as they fly in and get mangled up and fly out again in crazy stuff like this.
I don’t know, maybe I’m getting a bit too manic. Maybe it’s getting to that point where it’s not fun anymore, where the words flying round my head aren’t exciting anymore, just scary. Maybe I should actually do what my shrink tells me to, and stop staying up so late or drinking so much caffeine. Jesus, even take my meds. But what if they calm me down too much, send me too far the other way? They’ve done that before, set off another depression. I can never seem to stay in the middle. I guess that’s kinda the point with bipolar, but still, it sucks. Leech-style.
Come to think of it, do I even want to be in the middle? If I did everything my shrink told me to do, I’d have left the city ages ago to ‘avoid over-exciting myself’. Leave New York? He must be crazier than I am. I belong here, with the blinding light of the neon signs and the cacophony of the city at night surrounding me. I’d rather live in this chaos than be out in some deathly dull crypt of a town, avoiding over-excitement until the day I died, not with a bang, not even with a whimper, just a sigh of utter, unadulterated, goddamn boredom.
I need to use that somewhere.
