Greetings from the Dissolute Desk, dear reader – this is your captain speaking, though, let’s be honest, the term “captain” implies a level of control over this particular vessel that would make Ahab weep with envy.  Today is Hump Day, that blessed Wednesday phenomenon that sits like a literary critic at a poetry slam – uncomfortable, slightly drunk, and desperately trying to find meaning in the chaos.

Just a brief update today – and my brief, I mean the literary equivalent of what pharmaceutical companies call “brief” side effects, which somehow manage to include everything from mild nausea to spontaneous combustion – since I’m currently submerged in the proverbial full-court press on this goddamn book.  And yes, to the one dear reader who thinks I should cuss less, I said “goddamn” because sometimes the English language requires the theological weight of profanity to adequately capture the Sisyphean absurdity of the creative process.

You know how, as an adult, everything becomes a Byzantine maze of bureaucratic torment designed by someone who clearly never had to navigate said maze while suffering from the literary equivalent of erectile dysfunction?  That’s to say: the persistent, maddening, inability to get your metaphors up when you need them most?  So that’s going on, but still – and here’s where my inherent optimism battles my well-documented pessimism like two drunk philosophers arguing about the meaning of existence at 3 AM – progress is being made.

Meeting my goals today is a pretty big deal when it comes to getting a draft done by September 8, which looms before me like a literary deadline should: with all the warm, welcoming energy of a proctological examination performed by someone with exceptionally large hands and a questionable understanding of personal space.

But let’s talk about this Wednesday celebration business, shall we?  Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years of professional literary  debauchery – and by professional, I mean I occasionally get paid for this madness, though not nearly enough to justify the liver damage – it’s that midweek celebrations require a certain philosophical commitment to the absurd.

Think of it, man: it’s 2:17 PM Wednesday afternoon.  You’re three cups deep into what your local coffee shop optimistically calls their “house blend” but which tastes suspiciously like it was filtered through a gym sock that’s seen better decades.  Your manuscript stares back at you from the computer screen with all the judgement of a disappointed parent who just discovered your college transcript.  The cursor blinks.  Blinks again.  Taunts you with its rhythmic insistence that something should be happening here, some magical alchemy of words and ideas that transforms the mundane suffering of existence into something approaching art.

And then – miracle of miracles – the worse come.  They’re okay words.  Not the kind of luminous prose that makes readers weep and critics genuflect.  But words nonetheless.  Honest, slightly deranged words that capture something essential about what it means to be a human being stumbling through the cosmic joke of modern life with nothing but caffeine, stubbornness, and an inexplicable faith that somehow, against all evidence to the contrary, this particular arrangement of sentences might matter.

The adult world, you see, operates on the principle that nothing should ever be simple, straightforward, or remotely pleasant.  Need to renew your driver’s license?  That’s be a three-hour odyssey through a government office that apparently hasn’t been updated since the Carter administration.  Want to submit a manuscript?  Here’s a 17-page submission guide that contradicts itself no fewer than 43 times and requires you to format your work in a font that doesn’t exist on any computer manufactured after 1987.

But writing – actual writing, the kind that matters – operates on different principles entirely.  It demands that you show up, day after day, to face the blank page with nothing but your wits and whatever chemical assistance you can legally obtain.  It requires a kind of courage that’s simultaneously heroic and utterly ridiculous, like charging into battle armed only with a thesaurus and a profound sense of existential dread.

So yes, dear reader, progress is being made.  Slow, painful, occasionally hallucinogenic progress, but progress nonetheless.  Each sentence wrested from the void feels like a small victory against the forces of entropy and editorial bitching.  Each paragraph that doesn’t make me want to delete everything and take up accounting represents another step closer to that September 8 deadline, which approaches with all the subtlety of a methamphetaminic rhinoceros.

And if that’s not worth celebrating on a Wednesday afternoon, then I clearly don’t understand the fundamental principles of either celebration or Wednesday, both of which seem increasingly arbitrary the longer I contemplate them.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a book to finish and a hump day to properly honor.  The words won’t write themselves, though fuck knows I’ve asked them nicely.

Transmission ends.  Resume your regularly scheduled existential crisis. 

From the Dissolute Desk, where the coffee’s strong, the deadlines are stronger, and the metaphors occasionally achieve escape velocity. 

N.P.: “Pissed Off and Mad About It” – Texas Hippie Coalition