If I disagree with you, it's because you are wrong.

I found these two images at about the same time, and I think it's significant, or at least appropriate. In place of "proverbs", you may insert: health advice, political opinions, convictions about race, sexual orientation and gender, denial of various global phenomena, and so on, and so on. 

What galls me is that practically no one prefaces their comments with "I believe that. . . " or "I think. . . " or "It has been my experience that. . . ", followed by a declaration of personal belief. Instead we get opinions hurled like explosive projectiles, and reactions like, "You fxxing moron, get back on your meds!". 

I was thinking today. . . just my opinion, but I was thinking what a disappointment the internet has become. When it was new, there was a sense of excitement, the unprecedented possibility to instantly access information and news, and global communications at light speed that SURELY would bring humanity together at last.

It has hardly come true, and sometimes feels like the opposite. Bland and cliched memes, almost always misspelled, represent practically the only form of benevolently-expressed opinion/sentiment. Read the comments section on just about any web page, and at some point, deeper down, it will devolve into snarling, mudslinging and thuggish name-calling. A lot of pages have started posting warnings to try to screen this shit out.

Let's not get into that left-out feeling, which I am sure only I experience (wink-wink, irony-irony), making me feel like an awkward thirteen-year-old girl. I tried to express some of that in a Facebook post: "friends" (meaning people they've never met who are potentially valuable business contacts) speaking to each other in a kind of impenetrable code that is designed to make others feel left out. 

What I got was two responses (as opposed to the few hundred sympathetic replies an "important" person would get), both from people who occasionally comment on my posts. One sent me a link which purported to tell me how to be more popular on Facebook so that my posts would reach more people. 

This wasn't what I was talking about. At all. I was talking about sensitivity to others, at least an attempt at inclusiveness in a very public medium, and not getting so much obvious pleasure from exclusivity. What she gave me was help for somebody who (she felt) obviously needed it, in order to step into line with the in-crowd. To change myself in order to join the popularity mill, instead of trying to change the system.

The other comment in essence said, "Well, I don't have that problem. I have lots of friends and I don't think anybody ever speaks in code. It never occurred to me to feel left out."

In other words, it's just you. Fine. Her opinion! But that doesn't answer the question: why do you think it's just me?

I'm an uneasy fit with all this social media stuff and would bail, if I didn't want to at least try to stay connected with the literary world. But high school dynamics continue unto death, I guess. My three novels failed, not because they were shitty quality but because they failed to be "popular", which means moving copies. No one talks about this, and if I try to get a discussion going about it, everyone looks away. They're embarrassed for me, somehow, and don't want to get caught up in it. It is the most entrenched, unspoken taboo in the writing field. 

But it's true! To be an author (as opposed to a writer), you have to be read. How else can it be defined? Why is that so unreasonable, so crass? To be read, you have to sell copies, but if you even say this out loud, you're seen as mercenary and an attention whore. But a concert pianist is not expected to play in an empty hall.

I guess this will be seen as a "rant", but at the same time, a blog is supposed to be a place you can express your feelings. Instead, I will go and do something else, entertain myself, have some fun - which I do, and which is the main purpose of keeping this blog going. After all, no one can steal my creativity, which I believe is intact in spite of everything.  I very seldom look at views, because if I get too much into numbers, it will be over. But my days of writing serious novels or even short stories are over. I have retired from the impossible horse race in which I always seem to bring up the rear.

Should I post this? Maybe not

I have my reasons for thinking these things, but in saying them, I break many taboos. That's why I need to say them. I came to the conclusion that there is no one on earth I can share this with, and that appalls me and doesn't surprise me.

Does failure pay the rent?

Not sure if it is the sludge of summer, the end-ish flavour of things, the Trump crap which really depresses me and even makes me anxious and depressed, or what. But I am fed up about certain things, and one of them is the Disguised Ad.

I'm seeing it all over Facebook now, maybe because it's the slow season. An author will post an article about, say, Trump's latest insane comment, and include a remark something like, "As I wrote in my fourth novel, Ten Tigers Ascending, the proletariat often blindly heed the inchoate prognostications of a demigogue to incite the fomentation of narcissistic monocracy." What he means is, "my novel says that too, only better". 

This particular novel didn't say any such gobbledygook, but this particular author MUST keep dropping in little references to his work to keep it alive in the minds of his readers. It's like product placement in the movies.  And what about "I was so deeply humbled to receive the Man Booker Award"? Humbled. I don't know about that. I would not blame the person for turning cartwheels of joy, but why not admit it?

My own novels fell flat, to say the least, and did not do well financially, though I still have no regrets in writing them. Generally speaking, they were well-reviewed. But those good and sometimes great reviews are just a pain to me now, because my novels never went anywhere. As always, the brass ring was snatched away from me just as I brushed it with the tips of my fingers.

I cannot tell you how long this has been going on.

My hope is that people will take my books out of the library and read them. I honestly don't care two figs about sales, but it would be nice if someone read them. I have no way of keeping track of this, so I have to go on faith. I am so sick of this having to hustle, to pitch, to drop in these little references so that my work will always be on my (potential, perhaps chimeric) readers' minds. 

Social media is bad, but internet culture generally is bad for making you feel BAD, badder than bad, unless you have "numbers": views, followers, hits of some kind. I never have, except for the occasional, baffling, much-read post. But most of them have only a handful of readers. Am I supposed to feel bad about that? I'm not going to stop doing it, at least not yet, because as of this writing I still feel like doing it. And that's why I continue. 

But at this point, on this day, at this moment, I feel fed-up and realize I won't ever have any appreciable level of "success" in the eyes of the world. I too have to hold up billboards for my work, but I try to keep it to this blog (with the same title as the third novel - did you notice?) and the separate Facebook page I set up for it. I've done what I wanted to and given it more than my all, and according to all those trite memes, this guarantees ultimate, shining success. Even if it doesn't, failure is just a "learning experience".

This strikes me as compassionate lying, so we/others don't feel so bad about screwing up or doing badly. Falling short. But the truth is, no matter how great the learning experience, there is no way that failure can pay the rent.

Consolation? Perhaps, but not a prize

Artists struggle to survive in age of the blockbuster

RUSSELL SMITH

Special to The Globe and Mail

Published Thursday, Nov. 28 2013, 5:00 PM EST

In the artistic economy, the Internet has not lived up to its hype. For years, the cybergurus liked to tell us about the “long tail” – the rise of niches, “unlimited variety for unique tastes” – that would give equal opportunities to tiny indie bands and Hollywood movies. People selling products of any kind would, in the new connected world, be able to sell small amounts to lots of small groups. Implicit in the idea was the promise that since niche tastes would form online communities not limited by national boundaries, a niche product might find a large international audience without traditional kinds of promotion in its home country. People in publishing bought this, too. The end result, we were told, would be an extremely diverse cultural world in which the lesbian vampire novel would be just as widely discussed as the Prairie short story and the memoir in tweets.

In fact, the blockbuster artistic product is dominating cultural consumption as at no other time in history. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on each successive Hunger Games, and the rep cinemas have closed. A few sports stars are paid more individually than entire publishing houses or record labels earn in a year.

A couple of prominent commentators have made this argument recently about American culture at large. The musician David Byrne lamented, in a book of essays, that his recent albums would once have been considered modest successes but now no longer earn him enough to sustain his musical project. That’s David Byrne – he’s a great and famous artist. Just no Lady Gaga. The book Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment, by business writer Anita Elberse, argues that the days of the long tail are over in the United States. It makes more sense, she claims, for entertainment giants to plow as much money as they can into guaranteed hits than to cultivate new talent. “Because people are inherently social,” she writes cheerily, “they generally find value in reading the same books and watching the same television shows and movies that others do.”

Well, the same appears to be true of publishing, even in this country. There are big winners and there are losers – the middle ground is eroding. Publishers are publishing less, not more. Everybody awaits the fall’s big literary-prize nominations with a make-us-or-break-us terror. Every second-tier author spends an hour every day in the dismal abjection of self-promotion – on Facebook, to an audience of 50 fellow authors who couldn’t care less who just got a nice review in the Raccoonville Sentinel. This practice sells absolutely no books; increases one’s “profile” by not one centimetre; and serves only to increase one’s humiliation at not being in the first tier, where one doesn’t have to do that.

Novelists have been complaining, privately at least, about the new castes in the literary hierarchy. This happens every year now, in the fall, the uneasiness – after the brief spurt of media attention that goes to the nominees and winners of the three major Canadian literary prizes, the Scotiabank Giller, the Governor-General’s, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust. The argument is that the prizes enable the media to single out a few books for promotion, and no other books get to cross the divide into public consciousness. And, say the spurned writers, this fact guides the publishers in their acquisitions. Editors stand accused of seeking out possible prize-winners (i.e. “big books”) rather than indulging their own tastes. This leads, it is said, to a homogenized literary landscape and no place at all for the weird and uncategorizable.

But even if this is true, what can one possibly do about it? Abolish the prizes? No one would suggest this – and even the critics of prize culture understand that the prizes were created by genuine lovers of literature with nothing but the best intentions, and that rewarding good writers financially is good, even necessary, in a small country without a huge market.

It’s not, I think, the fault of the literary prizes that the caste system exists. Nor of the vilified “media” who must cover these major events. It’s the lack of other venues for the discussion and promotion of books that closes down the options. There were, in the nineties, several Canadian television programs on the arts. There were even whole TV shows about books alone. Not one of these remains. There were radio shows that novel-readers listened to. There were budgets for book tours; there were hotel rooms in Waterloo and Moncton. In every year that I myself have published a book there have been fewer invitations and less travel. Now, winning a prize is really one’s only shot at reaching a national level of awareness.

So again, what is to be done? What does any artist do in the age of the blockbuster? Nothing, absolutely nothing, except keep on doing what you like to do. Global economic changes are not your problem (and are nothing you can change with a despairing tweet). Think instead, as you always have, about whether or not you like semicolons and how to describe the black winter sky. There is something romantic about being underground, no?

Look on the bright side: Poverty can be good for art. At least it won’t inspire you to write Fifty Shades of Grey.

BLOGGER'S NOTE. I re-ran this article strictly to make myself feel better. I was surprised to see how old it is, but in three years, things have only gotten worse. Strangely enough, it helps. It helps me feel that maybe-just-maybe I'm not the only one, though talking about failure is the greatest taboo and career-sinker there is. I don't remember seeing a single article about it on the internet, except for "oh, I was such a failure" followed by "but here is what I did to overcome this failure and find soaring success." Failure is something that really doesn't happen unless you go on to succeed, right? This is reflected by all those chirpy little Facebook memes about failure being a wonderful thing that you should "embrace", not be afraid of, and see as a stepping-stone to greater and greater victories. But what if it doesn't happen that way?

When this article first came out, I felt a tremendous amount of comfort in these words, but it's the only piece I've ever found that dares to criticize the industry. Or something. The whole system? In no way, shape or form do I blame individual publishers for this state of affairs, because they're just trying to survive. It's a juggernaut, and if "numbers" are any indication (and sheer numbers of "likes" and "stars" are now the ONLY measure of a writer's worth), I've failed.

I've seen fellow writers strive and strive and hurl their work at the wall, and once in a while it cracks. I'm not so sure I am willing to do that. The system was always hard, but it wasn't impossible. I didn't sell a huge number of copies of my first two novels, but I guess you could say they were critically well-received. "Fiction at its finest" from the Edmonton Journal now seems particularly heartbreaking. The Montreal Gazette books section gave me an entire page, with (mysteriously) a huge picture of me in colour, and said this book deserved to be on the bestseller list but never would be, because it was published and publicized on such a small scale. So the praise was sort of backhanded, after all, and only set up false hopes.

I thought I had a shot.

I didn't, and I know now that it would've been better, if I wanted TGC to see the light of day, to just set up a blog for it and hope for the 10 - 25 views I usually get. But it's 10 - 25 more views than I'd get if I did nothing. 

I can't lie in wait any more. I have to "move on", wherever "on" is. "Let go", and not "let God" because there isn't one, though I was a lay minister and taught Bible classes for fifteen years. Now THERE is a story of heartbreak, but I didn't just make it up out of my own head.

I know I don't make myself popular by getting into this stuff, as it's seen as "being negative", which is a big no-no no matter how dire things are. Just paste a smile on and keep turning that facet of yourself towards the world/social media (though turning and turning and turning it like that can be completely exhausting). People who are seriously interested in writing (or becoming writers, which is another thing entirely) want to believe that I am an anomaly. I suspect I'm not. The difference is, I talk about it, openly admit I have failed, and no one else does. If somebody tells me not to do something, I will immediately want to do it. And usually I do, fuck the consequences, because as a writer, it is all I have. Shouldn't I be able to write about anything I want or need to? I will continue to, whether it is popular or not. It does not matter, in the long run. In the world's terms, success will never come to me, even though I have been told over and over again that I have the "right stuff".

So I will write whatever comes into my head. No law against it. And I can guarantee it will always be honest and tell my truth, whether it would fit on a Facebook meme or not.

Why do I think I'm the only one?

This was one of those rare things I shared on Facebook, mainly because it rang all my bells at once. These are "issues" that come up again and again, and not just when I'm trying to sleep.

But my second reaction was: wait a minute. You mean other people go through this? This must be a mistake. But why are so many people clicking "like"?

Don't tell me other people go through these things. No. It's not possible.

Could it be that MOST people keep up a good face, a brave face, even when (especially when) they are going through absolute, utter shit? Could it be that most people, if they are facing any kind of adversity, even the niggling stuff, answer the question "how are you doing?" with "oh, I'm fine"? Might this absolute imperative to present a strong front backfire when they're lying down with their eyes closed in the dark, rigid with anxiety and utterly vulnerable?

I talked to someone I'm very close to recently, and she told me about the trite things people sometimes say to her when they're trying to be helpful. "Oh, don't worry, I'm sure it will all work out for the best." "Something will come along." "Just be positive!" "Maybe it wasn't meant to be." "What's the worst that can happen?" - and, my all-time least-favorite: "Everything happens for a reason".

That's only a notch away from "it's all part of God's plan" on the suicidal scale. Perhaps followed by (and I actually heard this one once), "There but for the grace of God go I".

People say these things because they don't know what else to say. They're afraid they will say the wrong thing. Even if they truly do want to offer reassurance, it stops the conversation cold. It'll get better! Case closed. It also sends the message: I don't want to hear this. 

Deeper than that is a certain abhorrence, a dread that this adversity is somehow contagious and will rub off on them. So they have to quickly dispel it with bland-isms that don't help at all and even make the loneliness, isolation and shame (for facing problems/failure is innately shameful) more painful.

There's a creeping suspicion these days that when things go wrong, it's because of something you did or didn't do, thought or didn't think. This is all linked to that cheery, chirpy philosophy that "we can do anything we want and have everything we desire if we just try hard enough". If you have the right attitude or send out the right energy, the Universe will respond and shower wonderful things on you.

So if the Universe isn't showering (and why should it, when it is totally oblivious of your existence?), it must be you. If your dreams aren't falling into your lap, if you get sick or lose your job and can't find another one in the shark-infested waters of today's economy - well then, why? 

It can't be the fact that life can be excruciatingly tough, unfair, even destroying certain people who have every right to thrive.

I think in this slick sugar-coated age of social media and its narcissistic posturing, this kind of crap is getting worse. That's why it is so rare to see something like this, an admission of vulnerability, of fear, of irrational yet gnawing worry. It's rare to see such humanness, because no one seems to want to admit to it. If you can't sleep because your gut is in a roil, well, what are you doing wrong?

Which is why I had that knee-jerk response. Everyone else has got it together, don't they? Deluxe vacations, glorious birthday parties, reunions of families that are loving and always get along. Perfect-looking selfies with perfect teeth and hair gently stirred by the (electric fan?) wind. And in my case, because most of my Facebook "friends" are writers, fabulous book launches attended by hundreds of people, TV interviews, prestigious awards, etc. etc. And big fat contracts with huge publishers, not to mention very cushy advances. And let us not forget the most important thing of all: sales.

The middle two are my biggest concern, though.  Am I sick, or what? Why did I lose 35 pounds in 5 months, without dieting, when all my life I've had a weight problem? (And I could have done without the TWO phone calls I had this week about my abnormal kidney function.) Will we have enough to live on in retirement, when neither of us has an income? Maybe this affects "everyone" (and that's another thing that bugs me, the "everybody thinks/feels/does/has" syndrome that is supposed to stretch to include pimps, drug dealers, members of Isis, and people in a coma). But not likely. The "everybody thinks/feels", etc., thing is a way to make ourselves feel better because we suspect we ARE the only one, and that we're losers because of it.

After centuries of contemptous silence and raw fear, people are just beginning to talk about "mental illness", specifically depression (because terrifying things like bipolar and schizophrenia are still the province of horror movies and those celebrity "memoirs of madness" that everyone sucks up so eagerly), but most people have no idea how it annihilates self-esteem and destroys hope. You just have a negative attitude, that's all, and if you'd be more positive you'd feel better and wouldn't have to just languish at home on drugs, and could go back to work and be productive like everybody else. Everything happens for a reason, so for God's sake stop taking those pills and get back to work! Self-pity never got you anywhere.

Then again, maybe it's far more therapeutic to read something like this. It might make some people laugh, but it didn't make me laugh. It made me wonder how anyone else could be that vulnerable without being destroyed. 

Falling in love again: damn you, Harold!

Falling in love again

Never wanted to

What am I to do?

I can't help it

Love's always been my game

Play it how I may

I was made that way

I can't help it

Men cluster to me

Like moths around a flame

And if their wings burn

I know I'm not to blame

Falling in love again

Never wanted to

What am I to do?

I just can't help it

I am a sap. And I know it. For years now - YEARS - I have pursued this elusive, illusive wild aquatic fowl, as Spock would put it. I have run around and around chasing my own tail.

There is a pattern to this. Falling like a shot sparrow, or an elk with an arrow through its heart, I lie quivering, seemingly dead. Then, mysteriously, sometimes years later, something happens.

I don't know how it happens.

I can't help but feel that my third published novel failed just as disastrously as the first two. I don't know why this is, except that I am not a very good hustler. In today's atmosphere of kill or be killed, that's as fatal as not being able to write at all.

I doubt if I will ever know how to play this game, and that admission is supposed to bring great humiliation down on me. At the same time, I am supposed to smile and act as if everything is fine. There is a slow trickle of articles from people "admitting" they have needed help for depression and other forms of mental illness. But it's quickly tucked away again as we put on our game face and get back out into the fray.

For that's how we "win", isn't it?

Harold enchanted me and totally took me over. I walk away, storm away, over and over again, after a year or couple of years, and I am sure it's "over", which I believe it actually is. So why then am I sending out yet another copy to someone in Los Angeles, making one more email attempt to reach someone in the UK? All my attempts to get someone to notice my book are so far-fetched, they are practically ludicrous, and I might as well save myself the postage. I always feel embarrassed to do any of it, but I am pulled back and forth because I also feel tremendous pressure to do it. And I should be doing it a  whole lot better than this.

Death never appealed to me much, either the death of my novels/dreams, or my own. I keep getting up again. It's stupid. Everything I do here is stupid because nobody sees it or cares anyway. But if I say so, I risk looking like a loser. So let's stay chipper.

Never wanted to. What am I to do? I can't help it.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Can I retire from life?

This has been brewing for a while, and whether or not anyone wants to “view” it is quite beside the point.

My husband recently retired from a 40-year career as an environmental engineer. This only happened a few weeks ago, and since then it’s like the air slowly being let out of a balloon – not so much into depression as exhausted relief from a stress that has dogged him for years.

Now he’s tinkering, the thing he likes best in the world, fixing things in the garage, contemplating home renovations large and small, taking over all the cooking (to my endless delight – I am SO tired of fixing meals, and he’s a much better cook than me anyway).

And I am looking at myself and wondering. A friend recently quoted an older woman she knows. “They retire. We don’t.” It made me think. It certainly would apply to the old style of marriage where wife waited on husband hand-and-foot. Not being the handmaiden type, I prefer a self-serve husband who heats up his own  beans because I hate the things (and scrape the bean-scum out of that pot while you’re at it).

But still. They retire. We don’t. Or I don’t. Retire from what? From this miasma of desire, this scrambling to try to get a foothold on something that will probably escape me forever?

Like a lot of people, I wanted to be a published author. It too me oh, so long to get there. And I did. Supposedly.

But “published author” is a relative term. It's sort of like saying “I have an income from writing”: which I do, and which I have had since 1984. But if you mention the size of the income (and you’d be surprised how many people ask), all you get is snickers or looks of amazement that you’d put that much effort into something that earns you less than the average paper boy.

I want to quit the whole thing: I want to quit wanting. I want to quit having my work up there, or out there, where brickbats can be thrown at it. I recently was really worked over for something I wrote, and it was not very pleasant. She had a right to feel the way she did, because what I said was wrong and I will always regret it. I did not think it through at all.   I think my attempt at an apology was only poked full of more holes, so I could not win.

This happens, a lot. Not just to me, though I've been reamed out many a time, often for no crime except being visible and expressing an opinion. I've seen commentary that is simply appalling all over the internet, including on YouTube videos of disabled children and babies with terminal deformities. People can be absolute shits, and they’re almost encouraged to be. Ridicule rules the day. It’s easy, because nobody really knows who you are.

The internet and blogs and social networking have changed everything: it’s often said, but never adequately understood. Everything is lived out in public.  As the old Moxy Fruvous song says, “Everyone’s a novelist, and everyone can sing/But no one talks when the TV’s on.” This  all implies a certain amount of exposure. We’re all nude in front of the cameras, folks, in a way that’s making George Orwell turn over in his grave.

So I was laid bare, peeled, not realizing what the full ramifications would be. The worst name I was called during that whole tirade was “amateur”. What does that mean? Is it tied to a certain amount of money? What amount? Is there a minimum? Could it be ANY amount? Or do you really have to earn anything at all?

I want to quit this. Writing is what I do, and it’s hard for me not to do it. Blogging for the most part has been fun, sometimes exhilarating, with very mixed results in the viewing department. I have had thousands, and zeros, and everything in between.

But that’s just the trouble. Views are like “friends” on Facebook. I know people with thousands of “friends”. How is this possible? How would you have time to “meet” all those people and still hold a job, or even attend to your basic bodily functions?

How deep are these friendships, or do they just bump along the surface in a world that sometimes seems like it is ALL surface?

I tend to illustrate my posts, and some like this, and some hate it and think it is stupid. The title of my blog was recently ridiculed:  never mind that the person didn’t get it, that the intentional sentimental irony of it flew right over their head. Misinterpretation rules in the land of bloghood, does it not?

I want to quit. Quit this. Quit it, resign, retire, leave. Walk. I don’t know if I can walk from writing and I don’t know if I can quit blogging, or caring, but I want to. I don’t want to send any more “queries” by mail. I don’t want to get any more stamped self-addressed envelopes in the mail, miserable little things with (usually) form rejections in them, or, once in a while, personal rejections, which are supposed to be better because they're not forms.

It’s great, in fact we think it’s a potential bestseller, but sorry, we can’t publish it because it doesn’t suit our list. 

I’ve let this get to me, haven't I? Yes. I’ve let critics get under my skin. Shame on me.  If I answer critics, I am peevish and hypersensitive and can’t accept a constructive comment. If I don’t, I don’t care or am too snotty to reply. If I apologize for writing something that is out of line, the apology is never enough because I somehow have to reverse time like Superman turning the world backwards in that movie and unwrite what I wrote. Anything less is cause for more jabs in my most tender places.

My so-called career, the thing I feel so ambivalent about and now would like to drop like a whole bag of hammers, is like a balloon just brushing the tips of my fingers. When I try to grab for it, it pops up beyond my reach. Stop trying then, they say. Just let it fall. Then I probably won’t want it anyway.

From worrying about whether I will ever see my work in print again, I QUIT.

From wondering if writing this will make one tinker’s goddamn of a difference to anyone, I QUIT.

From trying to entertain or please, something I had to do to survive as a child, I quit. No more court jester stuff, it’s killing me.

From trying to figure out whether certain other (mostly scarily anonymous) people are human or reptilian, I most definitely quit.

The internet is a no-man’s-land, a bizarre wonderland/wasteland that nobody has figured out yet. It has its exhilarating aspects, connecting with strangers (who could be anybody, by the way, even psychotic killers), getting “support” from other people who are addicted to sniffing Drano or whatever, and glopping up moploads of information from Wikipedia that may or may not have any truth in it at all. Then there are the darker aspects.

People are adopting babies through Facebook, and selling them on eBay. Men look at internet porn at work: even cops (it happened here not long ago, and they got into a spot of trouble). Suddenly it seems like eroticism has become as ugly as a rhinoceros, torn loose and galloping free. Four-year-old girls are being dressed up like prostitutes and encouraged to act like them.  Sometimes I want to bring back corsets, restraint, Sigmund Freud telling us that if libido is ever let loose, society will crumble in a matter of months.

But I digress. My work is now out there where “some” people can “sometimes” see it, and in fact I probably have had more views in a year of blogging than I had readers in 15 years of writing newspaper columns. I am still beavering away, and just getting so tired. Just wanting to throw away something that feels like an arm. You can’t throw your arm away, can you?

I resign from the monster I have created for myself, tugged and pulled by the nasty little bugger we call the internet. I just want to write because I want to write, because I feel like it. It can be as dumb as dirt. I can call it Barbie’s Sparkle-Plenty Pink Plastic Dream House and laugh if people take it literally and call ME stupid.

Wanting to be understood, wanting someone or anyone to "get" you, is the province of adolescence, is it not? But what happens when it never happens, when at the advanced age of (blbblblb) you realize you're never going to be "got" so you might as well get over it?

From wanting too much, from wanting anything at all, I quit, I resign, I fold, I surrender, I submit! Submission is a wonderful thing, is it not? I do it all the time. Just ask my editor.

"You had me at hello"

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

"Take my advice, I'm not using it"

Another journal entry. I get inspired in the morning and run off at the keyboard with my personal philosophy.

May 9/15

Saturday again; beautiful again. I don’t know. I keep telling myself I should be more unhappy, or not happy with what I have. All these people who continually exhort you to be happy with what you have: do they need to say it to you, or to themselves? And even if it’s to you, why are they so compelled to say it? What business is it of theirs what another person does? Are they so affronted by people who AREN’T happy with what they have? Do they have to be checked and corrected by someone with an obviously superior world view?

Why are we constantly being told how we should feel, how we should think? In the trivializing age of Facebook, etc., it’s even worse, with memes and other spiritual sound bites abounding, most of them patently untrue. It’s never “This is what I believe” or even “this is what I think you should do”, it’s “DO THIS”, as if the words are being passed down on high from Mount Olympus.

For God’s sake, don’t ask for anything beyond what you have already! At the same time, you can have absolutely anything you want in life if you try hard enough! (OK then, my order is in: 5 million dollars and a palomino pony.) And how about this one: never quit! Never quit! This is one of the most self-limiting things a person can practice, because sometimes quitting is the most liberating thing a person can do. It can release you from the shackles of trying, and trying, and trying, and feeling like a miserable failure because you “can’t succeed”, and what’s the matter with you anyway, shouldn’t you be able to have anything you want if you just try hard enough (and keep trying, and keep trying)?

I’ve known people who’ve gotten divorced, and when they tell their friends and relatives, it’s either “Oh NO!” (as in, a tornado just destroyed my house), or ‘Oh, nooooo. . . “ as in “my cat just got run over”, or – it’s harder to describe this “oh no”, but it’s a combination of grief, disappointment and bewildered judgement, as in “how in hell could YOU have let this happen?” These people, and that means most people, see it as a failure and even an unmitigated tragedy.

And there’s an even worse one, a sort of appalled, horrified silence, sort of like “my son was caught masturbating in class”. They just don’t know what to say.

So what of the people who have been in a miserable relationship for years and years, have felt alienated and alone, have fought bitterly and without hope of resolution, have endured infidelities and physical and emotional abuse from their partners? I’m afraid it’s still “nooooooo” from most people, because they have no idea what was going on, OR, they had full knowledge of what was going on and felt they should still stay together for the sake of the children. Or maybe they just weren’t trying hard enough.

Walking away from anything is a failure, even if, after walking away, you find the love of your life and are happy for the first time in your life. No, stay stuck, it’s more noble, and for God's sake keep your problems to yourself because talking about them, or even admitting you have them and couldn’t tolerate them any more, makes your friends and relatives deeply uncomfortable.

And that brings me to this point: gratuitous advice. Why are we supposed to be so grateful when someone throws buckets of unsolicited advice at us, when we either haven’t asked for it or have maybe asked them one small, simple question? This demonstrates several things. One, the advice-giver believes their view of things is far superior to yours, and by extension, you’re pretty incompetent at what you do and need to be set straight. Two, that you should be grateful for these stone tablets, even if you’re being  hit over the head with them. Three, that your obvious failure is an affront to them and, yes, makes them very uncomfortable. Buckets of advice douse this ineffectual, smoldering fire. Or so they think.

Advice-giving and homilies are a great way to shut someone up, usually someone suffering grief and pain. Here, have this, it’ll solve everything. You may go away now. Your grief and pain has just been corrected. I should know; I have never experienced anything like that! “Hmm, well, I'm glad that never happens to me. Here’s what you should do.”

It is the very rare person who can receive your pain, and do you know what? We usually have to pay them. Even then, real help is a dicey proposition because most therapists go by the book and say very trite things so they can congratulate THEMSELVES on what a great job they’re doing. And if your dismay and even anger persist, well then, you just have a lousy attitude and should correct yourself and adjust to the therapeutic environment. I'm giving you all this help, and you’re not “co-operating”, which means you're just innately self-destructive.  Sorry, I can’t treat you any more if you’re not willing to change.

I won’t get into such trite crap as “everything happens for a reason” (a baby dying of leukemia? School shootings? Al-Qaeda? The Third Reich? I could go on.) It’s almost as bad as "it's all part of God’s plan” (something someone said to me when my son’s roommate was murdered, his head kicked in in a parking lot by two "friends" after a bar fight). Or, worst of all, “God never gives us more than we can handle.”

Oh yes? Have you ever heard of suicide, or are “those people” outside the human pale?  I knew a lady who liked to say, “Our prisons and psychiatric hospitals are full of people who had more than they could handle.”

But hey.  I never have more than I can handle, so I can inflict this philosophy on you with impugnity. In fact, having “helped” you this way, I can dust off my hands and carry on, free from having to stare into the grief-stricken eyes of a fellow human being in genuine human pain.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA