Vice Principles

No, that's not a typo. This is the first thing that came to my mind yesterday when I started thinking about potential blog post topics. Here goes.

If I think about what constitutes a writer, of what a typical writer might look like, the stereotype that appears in my head is a middle-aged man - perhaps more towards the upper end of that age bracket - sitting alone at a desk in a room strewn with papers, both stacked and crumpled. The room is dark, except for the dim, white glow of a table lamp which illuminates not only the workspace and typewriter but also a glass of whiskey and the wisps of smoke snaking their way towards the ceiling, slowly drifting away from the cigarette resting in the ashtray. Basically, I think of a reclusive, alcoholic, chain-smoking old man. Granted, that is a stereotype - and one which is probably not representative of even one percent of working writers around the world - but for some reason this, to me, is what a writer looks like.

That's not me. Okay, I'm making progress on the recluse part but certainly not the rest. I am a non-smoker who has never been drunk and never used drugs. I don't even swear. Despite my almost universally left-wing ideology, I lead quite a conservative life. Sometimes I think even a nun or a monk might consider me a square and tell me that I need to just chill out. They'd probably be right. It's not for any particular reason that I don't do any of those things, not for religious or even moral reasons, it's just what feels right to me. I just try to be a good person. But trying to be a good person has not made me a happy one. Quite the opposite.

Maybe it's because my conscience is so loud and difficult to silence that I find it hard to be happy. I don't allow myself to make mistakes and rarely forgive myself when I do. I'm not suggesting I'm about to throw in my values for a bottle of vodka and a packet of smokes but I do think that a little reckless abandon wouldn't go astray. It might serve me better than a logical, reason-based approach.

It seems I've got myself a little side-tracked. I wanted to focus more on my idea of what a writer is and what I think my shortcomings are in this respect. The type of writer I described above is someone so full or emotion, so complex and deep, that they need to self-medicate with alcohol. If I don't dull my emotions with alcohol, and I don't, does that mean I'm not feeling things as deeply as someone who does? Does that mean I haven't experienced sufficient pain and don't have the insight to write something meaningful? At this early stage in my life I know I don't have the life-experience required to really have any measure of understanding of the world, let alone the ability to express anything profound, but I don't take myself seriously. But later in my life, when I have seen more and experienced more, will the depth of my experience be proportional to me need to drink myself into a stupor? I don't think so but right now I just feel like some goody-two-shoes, middle-class, white guy who really doesn't have all that much to say.

As you've probably gathered by now, this is just near-incoherent, stream of consciousness stuff that doesn't really make a lot of sense. I would delete it and start again but I'm just too tired. It'll have to do as today's post. I'll try to be a little more comprehensible tomorrow.