A Writer’s Guilt
“Get some rest, sinner.”
Those words uttered in my go-to feel good asylum “Californiction” — maybe the best TV series ever produced — hit me right in the soul, when I got to hear them the other day.
They feel like a bumper sticker, attached to my inner flip chart, that shakily stands in the hallway, with a bad leg.
Bright and aggressive, it jumps at my eyes, telling me to pipe down.
In the episode, that I was watching, the main character, Hank, an author plagued by his tendency to fuck things up, is returning from a bender of vicious transgressions, to talk to the love of his life, in order to find some sort of absolution.
“Get some rest, sinner” is all that she can answer to her broken man.
Her words of advice felt like they were directed directly to me.
Like Hank and a lot of other writers, I too have a tendency to feel weary, as if it’s the default setting, that an artist can’t help but deal with every other moon.
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It seems like a monstrous pile of shame that keeps pouring over me, punishing me for not writing or not keeping up with my own expectations, and I am suffocating in its pitch black, merciless skunk of hopelessness, with nowhere to look, but that ugly bumper sticker.
The empty bottles of red wine, the carelessly folded sheets of innocent white paper, they are all rotting right next to the paths not taken, the opportunities left unraveled.
Indeed, I have sinned. More than I can recollect.
More than I could ever write about.
But I do it anyway.
So now it is just me laying here, watching “Californication”, with a heavy heart and a tortured mind, resting my head on the pillow.
That human, trying to get some sleep.
That writer, trying to gain some perspective.
If only I could rest, if only I could reconcile.
If only the sun would truly rise tomorrow, and it wasn’t me blinking into the bleak afternoon.
But I am just a sinner, trying to get some rest.
