Desire, Jealousy, And Indifference

Witness one of the tragic ballets churning to a toneless red froth in the blender of my head:

My desire for a life of total authorial autonomy and an anxiety-lessening financial security has resulted in what feels like my having taken Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours and turned it into a light warm-up. 

I have taken the measly lawnmower motor of my mind and tried to polish and oil its every crucial piece and mechanism, and every moment of that painstaking and laborious process has been in service of what I've always considered a virtuous existential goal.

All of it was fueled by my desire to create interesting and beautiful art.

But fuel is volatile, and one of the unintentional atmospheric hazards of that fuel is that often it sparks an inferno of jealousy inside of myself. Seemingly all day long I read about some woman who's probably younger than I am who wins the Man Booker Prize, or some guy around my age who gets $2 million for his debut novel, or some other person who sells a movie or gets a job on a writing staff, and suddenly I wish to douse the inferno I've become with a cooling leap from a very tall bridge.

In a sense, there is no need for me to be jealous, because I have created what I consider interesting and beautiful art, and as so many people have tried to insist to me, isn't that what really counts? (I tell them every time, "Not when you're trying to build a career, it's not.") 

A better question might be, "Why place such a high value on commercial popularity in a culture that so consistently celebrates utter artistic shit?"

And again to me the answer comes down to the fact that the unavoidable reality is that in all cultures a person needs at least some money to survive.

Enter indifference. The indifference of the marketplace so far, that is.

I am all fuel and desire and fire, and the marketplace—the void—emptily stares back.

Oil and water, not space and time.

For the previous 20 years of my life, I was able to use that indifference as a catalyst to create even more desire—fuel to write more and read deeper into the night. Now? The blender is winning, and the indifference makes me jealous of those who've been shown intercontinental love.

This is how I have chosen to make money. If it doesn't work out after this latest and final push to the sun, then the task at hand metamorphoses into my need to figure out how to dilute the noxious fuel of my desire and live a life away from the guiding light of my retired ambitions. Frankly, I am as comfortable not having anything on the marketplace as I am having books on the marketplace (I only ever published them because I need money and thought they would sell—I am already inwardly validated about their quality), so the real question, which I can't seem to answer or surmount, is, "If my life must have a daily master over most of its time again, to what worthwhile labor shall I give hold of these precious reins?"

Right now, everything I can think of feels like it would inevitably turn into the sensation of being slowly—agonizingly slowly—choked to death.

So if you ask me how I'm doing and it takes me a moment to answer, that was me drinking another glass of emotional-ballet blood and lying about its taste.