Goddammit

What the fuck am I doing back here already?

It hasn't even been a month yet. I was supposed to disappear for a lot longer than that. I hate writing, and Hive always seems to exhaust me for some reason, yet here I am writing on Hive again and setting myself up for hatred and exhaustion again. Should I cancel my delegation to qurator so I can go back to hitting people with a whopping one-nickel upvote, or should I just leave it delegated and switch to only tipping people with pizza and beer tokens? I don't know but I could really use some pizza and beer right now. Every day I force myself to go job hunting around the various writing job boards, hoping to find and apply for a writing job that doesn't make me want to hammer a tent peg through my own fucking skull. Unfortunately, everything that's available these days makes me want to hammer a tent peg through my own fucking skull. Oh, you're seeking top-notch storytellers who love juggling multiple tasks and have expert-level SEO knowledge and impeccable spelling and grammar chops and who are also great team players and never miss a deadline—and you're paying a "competitive" 10 cents a word freelance contract with no byline or benefits of any kind? Go fuck a lamprey in the mouth you fucking pisslicker. I think I've permanently broken the part of me that used to be able to write bullshit marketing copy for a living. On the one hand that's good because I don't have to write bullshit marketing copy for a living anymore, but on the other hand that's bad because writing bullshit marketing copy has been my main source of income for well over a decade. So what am I supposed to do now? One of my exes once told me that I use the word "anyway" too much, both in written and verbal communication. So anyway, this morning I woke up cold and alone at dawn like I always do, rolled out of my tent, threw a rock at the bluejay that was preparing to take a shit on my car, threw another, and then stood there shivering and staring at the Sawatch while I waited for the JetBoil to make my water hot enough for coffee. I was right smack-dab in the middle of a deeply satisfying thought about how pointless everything is when suddenly I realized that I really, really needed to write something today. Hence this post. I think the Crank Yanker was probably a mistake, but it helped me put all of these words here in this here particular order, and either way it's the bar's fault for taking my dollars and pouring beer in a glass for me. I can already feel the burnout breathing down my neck like the wolves in my dream last night. For anyone who's curious, dying in a nightmare does not result in dying in real life, although if I'm being honest that would be a really sweet way to go. Way back when I worked in editorial at Groupon, my manager and I used to joke that being a writer is a terrible thing to do with your life. At the time it was a bit tongue-in-cheek, although I think we both understood there was something sort of sinister in the normalcy of creative types putting guns to their heads, their heads into ovens, et cetera. Now I'm not sure how tongue-in-cheek it really is. For instance, what if I had gone to college for computer science instead? But anyway, I didn't, and so here I am tossing words onto the internet again and hoping something good comes of it before Russia takes out the entire North American power grid and starts smashing big red launch buttons while we're all arguing with each other in the dark about who gets to use the generator to charge their satphone next. The only thing I wanted for Christmas was the ability to be a consistent, everyday kind of writer—but Santa didn't deliver, so before he could get his fat jolly ass back up the chimney I wrapped a string of icicle lights around his fat jolly throat and choked him to death, in real life. Then I fled the flatlands and drove west till I saw mountains.